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.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.
We’ve set a goal to raise $260,000 by December 31. That’s an ambitious goal, but one that will give us the resources we need to invest in the high quality news, opinion, analysis and cultural coverage that isn’t available anywhere else.
If you feel inspired to make an impact, now is the time to give something back. Join us as a member at your most generous level.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO