A hot plate warmed food in the darkened kitchen in Brooklyn, allowing an Orthodox Jewish mother to feed her family while observing the Sabbath prohibition on lighting a flame. Upstairs, she and eight children slept.
That small convenience led to the city’s deadliest fire in eight years, after flames that began in the kitchen ripped through the home, trapping seven children ages 5 to 16 in their bedrooms, as their mother and a 15-year-old sister, cloaked in thick smoke, jumped out of second-floor windows. They were the only two survivors.
Amid the pandemonium, Mr. Jemal later recalled to Mr. Sedaka, he had almost slammed the door on his cousin. Banging on his door and begging for help, Ms. Sassoon was so hysterical that Mr. Jemal did not recognize her.
Flames shot 15 feet out of windows on both sides of the house. Mr. Sedaka and other neighbors awoke to the sound of screams. About 15 firefighters, with hoses blasting, charged inside.
Ms. Sassoon’s second-oldest child, Siporah, had also jumped from a window. “Mommy, Mommy, help me!” a neighbor, Andrew Rosenblatt, said he heard her scream.
But from inside the home, Mr. Rosenblatt said, he heard more muffled cries. Siporah’s seven siblings were trapped behind, wailing from the bedrooms. The smoke had grown so thick that Mr. Rosenblatt could no longer see the back of the Sassoon home, about 40 feet away. “She valiantly tried, although she was badly burned, to get out and get help,” Mr. Nigro said of Ms. Sassoon. “She was very brave.”
Before Mr. Rosenblatt had gotten off the phone with a 911 dispatcher, fire engines were screeching up to the home. By then, flames eating through the first floor forced the firefighters to spray water on the blaze before they could enter. The stairwell was still barely navigable. They knocked down the flames and found the children in their bedrooms, but instead of survivors, they brought out only victims. The children were passed through windows to firefighters who were on ladders and on a porch behind the house.
“They took them out every which way,” said James Long, a fire department spokesman.
The firefighters started resuscitation efforts as they rushed the children, some of them badly burned, to waiting ambulances. They were carried through the yard where Isaac Apton, 18, a neighbor, said the children had been building snowmen this winter, and onto the street where they liked riding their bikes. On the Sabbath after sundown, Mr. Apton said, they played games of wooden blocks with each other before their early bedtimes.
“They’re some of the nicest, most well-behaved kids,” he said. “A great family.”
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