Interview with Gabriel Sassoon

Sanguine

Sat, Mar 28 2015, 5:21 pm

Arutz Sheva paid a visit to Gabriel Sassoon, the bereaved father who tragically lost seven of his young children in a fire last Shabbat caused by a hot place malfunction at the family's home in Flatbush, Brooklyn.

Sassoon, who is currently sitting the traditional shiva period of seven days of intense mourning for his children in New York, remarked on the great outpouring of support from the Jewish community seen in huge turnouts at the funeral preparations in New York and then the burial in Jerusalem.

Following the tragedy there has been a "great awakening and opening of the hearts, and I don't want this opportunity to go to waste," he said. "I see how great the people really are, and that we are really one deep inside."

"Remember to love and live with love, if everything is lived with love it's a labor of life, it's a pleasure," Sassoon urged.

Speaking about the 3,000-year-old capital of the Jewish people where he buried seven of his children, he remarked "Jerusalem is for me the center of the world...it's the most spiritual place there is, where the Beit Hamikdash (Holy Temple - ed.) is going to be rebuilt in the future. ...It's the heart of the Jewish people."

"I raised my kids to be pure and holy and that's the place I wanted for my kids to be. My kids grew up there, I bought next to them spots for me and my wife and my living daughter and her future husband," Sassoon said.

Of his seven children who died, Elian (16), David (12), Rivka (11), Yehoshua (10), Moshe (8), Sara (6), and Yaakov (5), the bereaved father said "they're all one."

"Hashem took them all together because they loved each other so much they're really one, Hashem made a whole bouquet of roses because they're really one."

Sassoon noted that he hopes to collect stories about his children from those who knew them and put them together into a book in their memory.

Ahead of World War Two Sassoon's family fled from Syria to Japan, where he grew up. At the tender age of 16 he lost his mother, and later on he left to study Torah in Jerusalem, before marrying and eventually relocating to New York.