A pregnant woman and her husband en route to a hospital were killed in a hit-and-run car crash in Brooklyn early Sunday, but the baby survived.

Nachman and Raizy Glauber, both 21, were driving in a livery cab when a gray BMW sedan crashed into the side of the cab at the intersection of Wilson Street and Kent Avenue in Williamsburg, police said.

A male driver and another passenger in the BMW then fled the scene of the accident on foot.

Raizy Glauber was thrown from the car and her body landed under a parked tractor-trailer, said witnesses who came to the scene after the crash. Nachman Glauber was pinned in the car, and emergency workers had to cut off the roof to get him out, witnesses said.

Nachman Glauber was pronounced dead at Beth Israel Hospital, while his wife died at Bellevue, police said. The couple's premature son was delivered at the hospital and was in serious condition.

"The baby has no worry at all about being well raised and well taken care of," said community activist Isaac Abraham, a neighbor of Raizy Glauber's parents.

"There's going to be such community outreach from psychological to moral to financial assistance, that's the least worry, the child should just make it."

Police are continuing to search for the occupants of the BMW. No arrests have been made yet.

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The driver of the livery cab was also taken Beth Israel Hospital, where he is listed in stable condition, police said.

On Saturday, Raizy Glauber "was not feeling well, so they decided to go" to the hospital, said Sara Glauber, Nachman Glauber's cousin.

Hundreds gathered in Williamsburg Sunday afternoon at a funeral for the Glaubers, both Orthodox Jews. Jewish law calls for burial of the dead as soon as possible.

The Glaubers were married about a year ago and had begun a life together in Williamsburg, where Raizy Glauber grew up in a prominent rabbinical family, Sara Glauber said.

Raised north of New York City in Monsey, N.Y., and part of a family that founded a line of clothing for Orthodox Jews, Nachman Glauber was studying at a rabbinical college nearby, said his cousin.

"You don't meet anyone better than him," she said. "He was always doing favors for everyone."

She added that, of him and his bride, "if one had to go, the other had to go too because they really were one soul."

During the funeral, the sound of wailing filled the air as two coffins covered in black velvet with a silver trim were carried from a vehicle.

A succession of men and women delivered eulogies in Yiddish, sobbing as they spoke into a microphone about the young couple. "I will never forget you, my daughter!'' said Yitzchok Silberstein, Raizy Glauber's father.

Afterward, the cars carrying the bodies left and headed to Monsey, where another service was planned in Nachman Glauber's hometown.

NBCNewYork.com

NEW YORK -- A religious counselor in Brooklyn's ultra-orthodox Jewish community was convicted Monday of the sustained sexual abuse of a girl who was sent to him with questions about her faith.

The courtroom was silent as Nechemya Weberman was convicted of 59 counts, including sustained sex abuse of a child, endangering the welfare of a child and other counts. He faces 25 years in prison on the top charge and two to seven years on the lesser charges.

The 54-year-old defendant and his relatives stared down at the ground as the verdict was pronounced. Some of the accusers' supporters smiled quietly.

The accuser, now 18, told authorities Weberman abused her repeatedly from the time she was 12 until she was 15.

Defense lawyers said the jurors, who deliberated about half a day, did not properly grasp the complicated issues.

"We firmly believe that the jury got an unfairly sanitized version of the facts," said attorney George Farkas. "As a result, the truth did not come out and the struggle continues in full force to free this innocent man."

The case was a crash course for jurors about the customs and rules in the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community in Brooklyn, home to about 250,000, the largest community outside Israel. It spotlighted the strict rules that govern the Satmar Hasidic sect.

Guarded community
Weberman is not a licensed counselor, but worked with families within his community for decades. The girl was sent to him because she had been questioning her faith, was dressing immodestly and showing an interest in boys, all violations of the sect's rules.

Prosecutors say Weberman molested the girl for years behind a locked office door. Defense attorneys argued the counselor was the victim of a vindictive child who was angry that he had betrayed her trust when he went to her parents after learning she had a boyfriend.

"When she found out that she had been betrayed, she went wild," defense attorney Stacey Richman said.

The trial has rocked the insular, tight-knit group, not only because of the shocking charges but also because the case was played out in a public court. The guarded society strongly discourages going to outside authorities.

The victim testified that she and her family were harassed and shunned for coming forward; her father lost his business and her nieces were kicked out of school.

During the trial, which began last week, three men were charged with criminal contempt for snapping images of the accuser on the witness stand with cellphone cameras and posting them online. And before the trial began, Brooklyn District Attorney Charles Hynes charged other men with trying to bribe the accuser to drop the charges.

The teen testified for three days about the abuse, detailing that Weberman forced her to perform oral sex and act out porn films. She said the abuse lasted from 2007 to 2010. Her family paid him $12,800 in counseling fees during that time, the victim's mother testified Monday.

"I wanted to die rather than live with myself," the accuser testified. "I didn't know how to fight. I was numb."

Kathy Willens / AP

Yocheved Lerner demonstrates cardiopulmonary resuscitation technique during a women's-only CPR training session in the Borough Park section of New York, on Nov. 9.

Most Orthodox Jewish women avoid touching men except direct relatives. They don't sit next to men on buses or even at weddings. They have separate swimming hours at indoor pools. But for an emergency birth, Orthodox Jewish women will usually turn to the all-male volunteer ambulance corps known as Hatzolah.

Now a group of women in one of the country's largest Orthodox Jewish communities is proposing to join up with Hatzolah as emergency medical technicians to respond in cases of labor or gynecological emergencies.

The proposal for a women's division has stirred up criticism within Orthodox Jewish circles, with one well-known blog editorializing that it amounts to a "new radical feminist agenda." And when a prominent elected local official, Assemblyman Dov Hikind, spoke about it on his weekly radio show, he was criticized for even bringing the subject up.

Rachel Freier, a Hasidic attorney who is representing the women in the Borough Park neighborhood of Brooklyn, said there is a need for emergency services that adhere to the community's customs of modesty, calling for the sexes to avoid physical contact unless they are related.

"It has nothing to do with feminism," Freier said. "It has to do with the dignity of women and their modesty."

She is careful to avoid framing the proposal as a critique of Hatzolah, whose work she says they respect. Instead, she says it is a matter of reclaiming a "job that has been the role of women for thousands of years" — that of midwife. "We are so proud of Hatzolah," she said. But, she added, "they can't understand what a woman feels like when she is in labor."

The volunteer ambulance corps was founded by Rabbi Herschel Weber in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, in the 1960s in response to a perceived delay in responding to emergency calls made by Jewish communities. Today Hatzolah, a Hebrew word that translates as "rescue" or "relief," has dozens of affiliates around the world, each of them operating independently and often in close coordination with the community they serve. Policies, such as whether women can volunteer, are usually set locally by each affiliate.

It is unclear how many Hatzolah affiliates allow women to volunteer. But in Israel, for instance, United Hatzalah, which responds to more than 112,500 calls per year, has volunteers who are both male and female, as well as secular and Jewish, according to its website.

And the new division being proposed in Brooklyn by the women Freier represents — it would be known as the Ezras Nashim, Hebrew for "women's section" — would be modeled after a program created more than a year ago in New Square, N.Y., a small, insular Orthodox Jewish community in New York City's northern suburbs.

But a program for women, with women volunteers, in Borough Park would be far more ambitious in scope and size. Besides being one of the biggest Orthodox Jewish communities in the country, if not the world, the neighborhood had the city's highest birth rate in 2009 with 26.7 per 1,000 people, according to the Department of Health. That is a lot of babies that need to be delivered.

Yocheved Lerner, 49, is one of the women who would like to work as a volunteer for a newly formed all-women Hatzolah division in Brooklyn.

A state-certified emergency medical technician and mother herself, she said her group has a list of about 200 trained Orthodox Jewish women who could respond to medical calls in the neighborhood.

"There are strict rules between men and women, except in the case of Hatzolah," she said. "The problem is that any number of men might respond to a call on Hatzolah." That has been a source of "tremendous embarrassment" for some women, she said.