3 Boys Die in Fire Caused by Stove Left on for Pesach
Fire caused by stovetop burners left on for Pesach killed three boys as it whipped through a Brooklyn apartment at 5:30am, a few hours after the family had gone to bed at the end of their Seder.
Ten other people were injured in the fire and were treated by Hatzoloh and Shomrim, including two sisters who jumped out a second-story window and three firefighters. The boys who died were two brothers, Shyia and Yidal Matyas, 15 and 13, and their 7-year-old nephew, Shlomi Falkowitz.
A fire official said that the Halacha of leaving a flame burning during Shabbos and Yom tov has caused 35 kitchen fires at Bedford Gardens, the 600-unit apartment complex in Williamsburg, in the last several months.
Halacha prohibits any work on Shabbos and Yom Tov, including lighting or extinguishing a flame, a rule many families deal with by leaving fires burning so they can heat food when it is needed. This year, Passover began at sundown on Saturday, as the weekly Sabbath was ending, so many stoves were left burning for days. The Matyas family told fire marshals that they had at least two burners lighted continuously since Friday, a fire official said.
Shimon Matyas, the father of two of the boys who died, was discharged from Long Island College Hospital tonight with tears in his eyes and a bandage on his hand. He had missed his 7-year-old grandson’s funeral.
Two of Mr. Matyas’s older sons told reporters that the family smelled a suspicious odor, something like rubber, late last night, but could not trace its source and went to sleep. They woke to an apartment filled with thick black smoke. Panic set in quickly as the family could not raise the safety gates that protected some windows and could not break the glass on others.
Leah Roth, who lives across the courtyard from the apartment that burned, said she awoke to “terrible shrieking.” Her husband and a maintenance worker rushed to the apartment and managed to break down the door but were driven back by the heat, Mrs. Roth and a fire official said, while Mrs. Roth’s brother ran to the courtyard and threw rocks at the windows.
Mr. Matyas’s daughters, identified by neighbors as Sarah, 20, and Gitty, 18, finally smashed their window and jumped to the concrete sidewalk. Sarah suffered multiple fractures and was in serious condition last night at New York-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell hospital in Manhattan.
After Mrs. Roth’s brother smashed the window into Shimon and Rachel Matyas’s bedroom, Mrs. Matyas yelled down to Mrs. Roth’s brother, “What’s going on in the other room?”
“She wanted to know if we could see kids at the window,” Mrs. Roth said. But there was no stirring from the room where her sons slept.
“When they carried out the boys, it looked like they had slept through it,” Mrs. Roth said. A neighbor said the 7-year-old Shlomi was in another room, and appeared to have suffered burns.
The Matyases had lived in their three-bedroom apartment at 104 Ross Street, off Bedford Avenue, since the complex opened 30 years ago, the property manager said. Shimon Matyas, 55, a cook at the Rose Castle catering hall in Brooklyn, enjoyed studying with his sons, several of the boys’ friends said.
A friend of Yidel’s, Chaim Klein, said that Yidel always thought of others first.
“He tried to help everybody,” Chaim said. “At school he emphasized that everybody should eat. And if someone came late to school, he would give extra food to him.”
A neighbor called Shlomi a great scholar. “He had prepared 35 interpretations on the hagadah,” she said. He was staying with his grandparents because his mother had just had a baby.
Neighbors said Shiya went to high school in London and was home for the holidays.
Stephen R. Kraus, the managing agent for Bedford Gardens, confirmed that stove fires were not unknown at the complex, which is home mostly to Hasidic Jews from the Satmar sect.
“I have heard there were numerous calls over last several months for fires, many of which did not require the presence of a fire truck,” he said. “Unfortunately you had Shabbos leading right into Pesach, so for three days you’ve had these stoves burning. And the heat builds up from nonstop flames all this time.”
Compounding the problem, a fire official said, was that the wall behind the stove was covered in wood paneling.
The apartment’s design also foiled an easy escape. “The kitchen is right next to the door in all these buildings,” said Yoeli Klein, 22, who lives in the complex. “If the fire starts in the kitchen, you’re gone unless you can find a way out the window.”
Some residents and neighbors said it seemed to take firefighters too long to gain access to the building, even those arriving from a firehouse two blocks away. But a spokesman for the department said that crews arrived within 3 minutes 50 seconds, below the citywide average response time of 4 minutes 18 seconds.
This afternoon, on the second day of yom tov, there was a solemn Levaya through the south side of Williamsburg.
Shlomi Falkowitz’s body, in a plain pine coffin 55 inches long, was carried on men’s shoulders from the row house where his great-grandparents live on Keap Street.
With men and women lining opposite sides of the street, the mourners proceeded in near silence. Muffled sobs came from the women’s side. The Levaya followed the body toward the funeral home. There was no Hesped, because of Yom tov.
“Since it’s Yom Tov, we won’t give a speech,” said Avraham Weiss, a warehouse manager. “We just walk down and give respect.”
Shlomi was buried this afternoon at a cemetery in South Brunswick, N.J.
11:30am, several hundred mourners poured into the streets as the van bearing the coffins of Shiya and Yidel headed to the same cemetery for burial. Their mother wept as the van left Williamsburg.
All day, as news of the fire spread throughout the neighborhood – by word of mouth, crowds paid visits to the courtyard, strewn with trash and milk crates, to gaze up at the charred apartment with burned tattered blinds hanging in what were once the windows.
“It feels very bad,” said Yisrael Leifer, 16.
