Tuesday, August 29, 2017
Jewish Community Mourns Couple Killed in House Fire
The second-story windows of the sage green house on 44th Street look out over a peaked porch roof in Borough Park, Brooklyn. On Monday, they were charred and without glass. Neighbors clustered below, whispering in English and Yiddish about how hours before some had watched helplessly as an early-morning blaze tore through the home in the largely Orthodox and Hasidic Jewish community. As the fire burned, a teenager who lived there had stood on that roof, begging someone to save her parents, trapped inside.
Her parents, Chaim Eluzer Shulem Gluck, 61, and Faigy Gluck, 59, were found unconscious in the home. They were pronounced dead at Maimonides Medical Center. Firefighters were able to rescue their 17-year-old daughter, who is known as Chana.
More than 140 firefighters responded to the three-alarm fire at 1174 44th Street, which took two hours to extinguish. A firefighter was taken to the hospital for smoke inhalation and later released, the Fire Department said.
The cause of the fire is being investigated. It was not clear if the family had working smoke detectors in the home. On Monday morning, fire crews stood beside the house and passed out fire-safety information and free smoke detectors.
Maurine Weiner, a neighbor, sat in her porch chair and stared at the remains of Gluck family's home. It was in their living room where she had taken knitting classes, which Mrs. Gluck taught for free to women in the neighborhood. It was in their kitchen where she sampled Mrs. Gluck's freshly baked challah, and where she got a chance to say a special prayer over the bread and be blessed.
None of this was surprising if you knew the Glucks, Mrs. Weiner said, recalling a day seven years ago when her neighbor waited by a window until she returned from the hospital to meet her in the snow with hot soup.
Mr. Gluck, who worked at a hardware company, had the same caring nature. Neighbors recounted the times when they returned from all-night wedding parties and saw Mr. Gluck leaving his house at 4 a.m., as he volunteered to open a synagogue for morning prayers.
Family was of profound importance to Mr. Gluck, said Shaya Birnbaum, a son-in-law. The Glucks had four children, two sons and two daughters. Mr. Gluck was known as a thoughtful gift-giver to his grandchildren, remembering to even include the batteries for electronic toys, Mr. Birnbaum said. He recalled how, when his father-in-law heard that he was struggling financially to send a son to summer camp, Mr. Gluck paid for it. "He didn't have the money, and like that, he still paid for it. That's who he was."
Mr. Birnbaum was at the house on Monday to salvage Mrs. Gluck's artwork. Mrs. Gluck would often sketch and paint portraits of her grandchildren, pictures that hung on the walls inside the house. She would give paintings as gifts to their schoolteachers, said Malty Reisz, a neighbor. "Now they're all burned up," she said of the artwork. "It's just so unbelievable."
As is Jewish custom, the funeral for the couple took place within 24 hours. At 2:30 p.m., mourners packed inside Shomrei Hadas Chapels, the men in formal, dark wear on one side of the curtained partition, and on the other side, the women, elegantly dressed, wearing scarves and traditional wigs. In the front row, Chana Gluck sat, near the velvet-draped coffins of her parents. Family members wrapped their arms around her.
The ceremony in Yiddish could be heard through speakers in the parking lot, where more mourners listened. Even with no knowledge of the language, the grief in each speaker's voice that poured onto 14th Avenue needed no translation.
Little inside the home was salvageable. But around noon, Jack Meyer, who works with Misaskim, a Jewish disaster relief organization, uncovered a velvet bag smeared with ash. Inside, it contained a Jewish prayer shawl, a tallit, untouched by the flames, and a small new prayer scroll, or tefillin, that was to be a gift from Mr. Gluck to one of his grandsons for his upcoming bar mitzvah.
The child would still get the gift from his grandfather, Mr. Meyer said.
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