Community steps in after family loses all
Neighbors help when belongings destroyed in crash amid move
CORAL SPRINGS — After more than 15 hours in the car from their old home in Baltimore, a young family was ready to settle into their new home in the Broken Woods community of Coral Springs.
Monday’s stormy weather ruined those plans. A driver who was trying to change lanes on Interstate 95 hit their moving truck, just 30 or so miles from their new home. Their belongings spilled across the rainsoaked highway, their furniture splintered, picture frames smashed, family heirlooms scattered, cherished photos fluttering away.
What came next was a community of strangers rallying to support their new neighbors. They answered a call for help the family posted to a Whatsapp group through their new synagogue, Chabad of Coral Springs.
“This community has showed us incredible, overwhelming, and abundant generosity,” said Tatyana Zamir, 34. “Not even a minute went by before somebody called me offering mattresses.”
After that, help kept pouring in from the people Zamir now calls family. They brought more furniture and food and helped the family sort through the heap of their obliterated belongings that a dump truck had slung in a pile on their front lawn.
On Wednesday, someone even brought bicycles and other toys for Zamir’s kids to play with, and cookies with hand-drawn notes attached so other kids could introduce themselves.
One child had written that they liked rainbows and asked Zamir’s children if they liked rainbows, too. Another stated that they like slime and wondered whether Zamir’s kids also like slime.
Zamir started working at her new job as an assistant teacher at the Hebrew Academy this week, and she said she didn’t have to worry about fixing something for dinner each night. The community took care of it for her, she said.
Natalie “Nechama” Gutman said under normal circumstances, she would open up her home to them until they could get their feet under them. But the coronavirus pandemic eliminated her chance to provide them that hospitality.
Instead, she and a few others spent Tuesday evening carrying donated furniture and supplies into their home until almost 1 a.m. and helped them sort through whatever was salvageable of their belongings amid the debris.
“It has been 6 months since I have seen most of my communi
ty,” Gutman said. “Six months since we had guests in our home. Six months since we sat together and prayed in synagogue.”
Now, “I saw the entire community out together and it was incredible.”
Families flooded the family’s lawn to help them sort through debris, and others brought over cereal, milk and toilet paper for the morning, she said. Some families left packages full of supplies, such as clothing, blankets and toiletries, on their doorsteps for Gutman to pick up.
Just before midnight, volunteers with the nonprofit group Legacy Closet brought by enough beds and furniture for the whole family, including all three children: a boy, 5, a girl, 4, and a 16-month-old boy.
“I can’t imagine what this family is feeling tonight,” Gutman said. “I do hope, though, when the dust begins to settle (literally and figuratively) that they know that despite COVID, despite social distancing and the craziness of 2020, they moved into a community that’s a family that will do anything we can to welcome them home.”
On Wednesday morning, volunteers with Legacy Closet went back to the home to help the family sort through the rest of their belongings, still in a pile on their lawn.
Volunteers saw the family go through a few emotional moments, including when city officials with the solid waste department came by to take the rest of their trashed belongings, even though they hadn’t even sorted through half of the pile yet.
A Legacy Closet volunteer said she saw David Zamir, 40, drop to his knees in despair. He started rummaging through the pile of splintered wood and glass shards in search of any sentimental items he might unearth, including the family’s prayer books and the lamp portion of a light fixture they had at their old home, she said. Anything that might com
fort his family, his three children.
They weren’t able to save their family’s heirlooms, Tatyana Zamir said. But at the end of the day, it was OK.
“The silver lining has been the incredible solidarity that people have shown us, and the ability to start over,” she said. “We could be very sad about it, but the community has been so supportive so we choose to focus on the positive.”
Zamir recalled how the community welcomed them with open arms on their very first night in their new home. “The night when all of this was dumped into our yard, one of our neighbors in passing said to my husband ’we’re going to get through this’,” Zamir said. The way they phrased it, that they were going to go through this together, was a huge comfort, she said.
Legacy Closet volunteers learned that all of the family’s kosher kitchenware had shattered and needed replacing, so volunteers set out to get them two brand new sets — one for meat and one for dairy — that would not defile their religious practices as Orthodox Jews.
Later that day, the local kosher restaurant Stefano’s brought lunch over for the family, said Chabad of Coral Springs’ Rabbi Avraham Friedman.
“People from all walks of life and from all backgrounds responded to help take this difficult situation and turn it into a point of unity by rallying behind the family,” Friedman said.
“As I’ve said in the past at a time like this where there’s plenty of focus sometimes on the negative, the underlying goodness that people have can get overlooked,” Friedman said. “This is who we really are. When we see someone in need, we forget about our differences and step up to the plate.”