Sarah Mayer, Faigy’s Older Sister, Hangs Herself Months After Roof Plunge
The older sister of a former Hasidic woman who killed herself four months ago by jumping off of a rooftop bar in Manhattan died after hanging herself.
Sarah Mayer, 31, was found dead on Sunday afternoon in her parents’ home in Borough Park, the New York Daily News reported.
Her death comes four months after Faigy Mayer, 30, committed suicide, six years after leaving the Hasidic 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 Hasidic sect of her childhood saying that “Hasidic Judaism shouldn’t exist at all,” and lamenting on all that her three nephews were missing out on by being raised in the same community.
“If people were allowed to think they would not be religious,” she also wrote.
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning journalism this Passover.
In this age of misinformation, our work is needed like never before. We report on the news that matters most to American Jews, driven by truth, not ideology.
At a time when newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall. That means for the first time in our 126-year history, Forward journalism is free to everyone, everywhere. With an ongoing war, rising antisemitism, and a flood of disinformation that may affect the upcoming election, we believe that free and open access to Jewish journalism is imperative.
Readers like you make it all possible. Right now, we’re in the middle of our Passover Pledge Drive and we still need 300 people to step up and make a gift to sustain our trustworthy, independent journalism.
Make a gift of any size and become a Forward member today. You’ll support our mission to tell the American Jewish story fully and fairly.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
Only 300 more gifts needed by April 30
