Heshy Fried writes on FB: “One of the most frightful days for the yeshiva administration was when the fire inspector showed up. I remember one instance when Rabbis were communicating with the janitor and beis medrish guys as to where exactly the inspector was located and where to place batteries in the smoke detectors…”
For some Jews, the laws of the goyim are only obstacles to be maneuvered around.
Growing up as a Seventh-Day Adventist, the laws of the land were taken very seriously (such as laws about taxes, fire safety, customs, immigration, school standards, etc). When I converted to Judaism in 1993, I quickly noticed that these same laws were not always given the same respect. I suspect that at least half of yeshivas in America use dodgy tax accounting (they often function as opportunities for money laundering and tax evasion). Whenever America goes to war, many Jews uninterested in becoming rabbis enroll in yeshivas to escape the draft and few rabbis see any moral problem with this. These Jews don’t feel the same obligation to the United States of America that the goyim do.
The Sabbath fire that killed seven children in an Orthodox Jewish family in Brooklyn on Saturday was at least the fourth deadly blaze in the borough resulting from Sabbath and holiday observance in the past 15 years.
In all 11 people have been killed in the four fires, all but one of them children. At least six other people were injured in the four fires, including the mother of the seven children killed this weekend, Gayle Sassoon, who was fighting for her life in the specialized burn unit at Jacobi Medical Center in the Bronx. An unknown number of others have been injured in similar fires that didn’t result in deaths.
Police and fire officials were quoted in news reports saying this weekend’s fire was caused by a malfunctioning electric hotplate in the family’s kitchen that was keeping food warm overnight in observance of the religious restriction on cooking during the 25 hours of the Sabbath.
A similar fire, also caused by a malfunctioning electric hotplate, killed an 8-year-old boy during the festival of Sukkot in October 2010. That fire, like this weekend’s, took place in the Midwood section of Brooklyn, the center of the borough’s large Syrian-Sephardic Jewish community.
Three other people were killed in two deadly fires caused by ritual candles, one in Borough Park in 2002, the other in Williamsburg in 2000, during the festival of Shavuot.
The victims in the Williamsburg fire were the granddaughter of Satmar Grand Rabbi Moshe Teitelbaum, Sarah Halverstam, and her 5-month-old baby Chaya.
Other Sabbath and holiday candle fires have resulted in serious injuries, including one in Borough Park in 2009, caused by an unstable oil-burning Hanukkah menorah, that wounded a 3-year-old and her babysitter, and another in the upstate Satmar enclave of Kiryas Joel in 2011 that critically injured a 70-year-old developmentally disabled woman.
By comparison, the controversial ritual of metzitzah b’peh, sucking the blood from an infant’s circumcision wound by mouth, is said by the New York City Board of Health to have killed two infants since 2000 and caused brain damage in two others, all apparently as a result of herpes simplex virus transmitted from the mohel’s mouth.
In all 12 infants contracted the virus through the ceremony during the period, though a respected Yeshiva University rabbinic scholar, Rabbi Hershel Schachter, was quoted in 2013 claiming that there were as many as 15 cases per year, most them covered up by hospital fearful of losing Hasidic business. He reportedly inferred the number, based on his daughter’s account of what she’d seen at the hospital where she works as a nurse. There’s been no confirmation.
J.J. Goldberg continues: “It’s a pity that so many Jews respond to bad news and questioning of our actions by circling the wagons, seeing only enemies and shreying gevalt. It’s especially troubling because it all too frequently prevents us from listening to the criticism, considering the advice and seeing how things could be improved. All the more so when children’s lives are at risk. They’re all our kids.”
Chaim Amalek writes: “In case any of you goyim reading this are wondering, there is absolutely nothing in the Torah that mandates or even mentions this penis-sucking ritual. And nothing in Torah forbids the use of electricity on the Jewish Sabbath. In each case, ignorant rabbes made the whole thing up.”
While an untended hot plate warmed food downstairs in their brick and stucco home minutes into the new day on Saturday, their mother slept a floor above. The hot plate was her answer to a Sabbath restriction on lighting a flame, a way to feed warm food to her eight children. They slept nearby.
When the hot plate malfunctioned, it sent flames creeping toward an open stairwell that led to their bedrooms. Soon they were trapped, screaming from behind a wall of flames. Their mother, Gayle Sassoon, 45, and their second-oldest sister, Siporah, 15, broke through the glass of second-floor windows and jumped onto the grass.
…There did not appear to be smoke detectors on the first or second floor of the house, the officials said.
