Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Fast Forward

Brazilian Jewish school takes in hospital patients escaping a fire

“Today our school lent its space and heart,” said an ex-student and mother of two kids at the school.

RIO DE JANEIRO (JTA) — A Jewish school here took in over 150 patients escaping a hospital fire, many of them in sick beds, on Wednesday.

The fire broke out in the Hospital São Lucas’ laundry room Wednesday morning, producing thick smoke that required an evacuation.

Employees at the hospital in Copacabana, one of Rio’s most Jewish neighborhoods, wheeled patients to the nearby TTH Barilan school and to the ground floors of apartment buildings. The incident made headlines across Brazil.

“Humanity is so complicated that, when you do the right thing, they say you’re like Superman,” TTH Barilan’s president Rafael Antaki told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “The hospital’s emergency plan was successful, and so was ours, focused on chesed and love,” he added, using the Hebrew word for kindness.

The unprecedented scene of hospital beds lined up in the school’s courtyard made parents, teachers and employees emotional. Kindergarten classes were temporarily suspended, but elementary, junior high and high school classes were not interrupted.

One patient needed to be resuscitated in the courtyard, the O Dia newspaper reported.

“Today our school lent its space and heart. Families came to help and did not even talk about exposing their children’s health and security, with the simple goal of helping the lives of people they didn’t even know. This is education. This is Torah, love your neighbor as yourself,” Viviane Cohen Schvartz, an ex-student and mother of two kids at the school, told JTA. “We can have a lot of advice and speech on how to raise children for the world, but only good examples and good deeds proliferate.”

Founded in 1954, Barilan is an Orthodox institution located in the heart of Copacabana, which is affiliated with two synagogues, the Bnei Akiva youth movement and a kosher restaurant that is open on Sundays.

This article originally appeared on JTA.org.

A message from our Publisher & CEO 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

With your support, we’ll be ready for whatever 2025 brings.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.