Af i s h heading for slaughter in a New York market shouted warnings about the end of the world before it was killed, two fish cutters have claimed.
Zalmen Rosen, from the Skver sect of Hasidic Jews, says co-worker Luis Nivelo, a Christian, was about to kill a carp to be made into gefilte fish in the city’s New Square Fish Market in January, when it began shouting in Hebrew.
“It said ‘Tzaruch shemirah’ and ‘Hasof bah’,” Mr Rosen later told the New York Times newspaper. Mr Nivelo told the media he was so shocked he fell into a stack of slimy packing crates, before running in panic to the shop entrance and grabbing Mr Rosen, shouting: “The fish is talking!” However his coworker reacted with disbelief.
“I screamed ‘It’s the devil! The devil is here!’, but Zalman said to me ‘You crazy, you a meshugeneh [mad man]!’” Mr Nivelo said. A disbelieving Mr Rosen then rushed to the back of the store, only to hear the fish identifying itself as the soul of a local Hasidic man, who had died the previous year.
It instructed him to pray and study the Torah, but Mr Rosen admitted that in a state of panic, he attempted to kill the fish, injuring himself in the process and ending up in hospital.
The fish was eventually killed by Mr Nivelo and sold.
