January 16, 2004 -- The elderly, wheelchair-bound wife of one of Brooklyn's most radical rabbis died yesterday after a kitchen fire gutted their home. A home health aide was cooking lunch for Lillian Hecht, 82, when the fire erupted at 2110 Ocean Parkway, police sources said.
The great-grandma, crippled from the waist down, was trapped in the wood-framed house she shared with her husband, Rabbi Abraham Hecht, for more than half a century.
The rabbi, 82, escaped unharmed, but was taken to the hospital as a precaution, family members said.
Hecht, a prominent Lubavitcher rabbi, was banned from Israel in 1995 when the government accused him of giving a religious justification for killing Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin after he agreed to trade land for peace with the Palestinians.
Rabin was gunned down by a young Zionist a few months later, and Hecht was suspended from his leadership of Congregation Shaare Zion on Ocean Parkway.
