Home ‘frauds’ paid squat
‘Sandy sob-story’ pair moved in — then stayed
A 91-year-old Holocaust survivor who lost her family home in France while hiding from the Nazis claims a pair of sinister squatters tried to take her vacation home in Queens.
Recently widowed Yvette Hyman agreed to let neighbors Sarah and Howard Kindler rent her threestory, four-bedroom home in Rockaway Beach for a below-market price for six months, believing the family had been displaced by Hurricane Sandy.
In reality, the Kindlers’ Rockaway Beach Boulevard house got through the storm just fine, Hyman claims in court papers. The couple just wanted to renovate it — and stayed in Hyman’s residence for two years and stopped paying rent, she charges in a Queens Supreme Court lawsuit against the couple.
As a teenager in Nazioccupied France, Hyman’s family hid from the Germans and lost their home after a friend entrusted to oversee the house refused to return it.
She relived a version of this nightmare in 2014 when the Kindlers “tricked her into leasing them her home in the wake of Superstorm Sandy, and then refused to pay or leave as promised,” Hyman said in court papers.
The Hyman family had spent summers in the Rockaways since the 1960s, but Yvette needed to sell the Beach 144th Street home to fund her retirement after the death of her husband.
In 2014, the sympathetic nonagenarian agreed to allow the Kindlers to rent — charging just $2,000 a month for the spacious house, when the Sandysoaked market could have netted her $5,000 a month, she claims. But she told them they needed to be out by September 2014 so she could sell it, the suit claims.
After 18 months, the Kindlers were still there, refusing to leave, and they even stopped paying rent altogether, according to court papers.
The Kindlers squatted there for another 21 months, nearly sinking Hyman’s bid to sell the place and leaving her in “a real-es- tate limbo,” says the suit.
Hyman’s lawyer, Michael Strage, said: “This was a mitzvah and they certainly did not treat it as such.”
The couple was eventually evicted.
Hyman is seeking more than $1 million in damages and plans to give at least some of the potential cash to help charities that give housing to underprivileged Jewish families.