The older sister of a former Hassidic woman who killed herself four months ago hanged herself at her parents’ home in Brooklyn.
Sara Mayer, 31, was found dead on Nov. 22 at the home in the Boro Park neighborhood, the New York Daily News reported.
Her death comes four months after Faigy Mayer, 30, jumped off a rooftop bar in Manhattan. Six years earlier, Faigy had left the Hassidic world in which she had grown up.
Unnamed family and friends told the Daily News that Sara Mayer was mentally ill and had been hospitalized on several occasions. An unnamed law enforcement official told the newspaper that she had been scheduled to move into a group home this week.
The New York Post reported that Sara Mayer was released last week from a psychiatric hospital where she had been an inpatient for two years. The newspaper also quoted an unnamed family member as saying she left a note to her parents telling them she loved them and was sorry.
In an essay written shortly before her death, Faigy Mayer rejected the Belz Hassidic sect of her childhood. She said, “Hassidic Judaism shouldn’t exist at all,” and lamented that her three nephews were missing out on life by being raised in the same community.
“If people were allowed to think, they would not be religious,” she also wrote. — jta