5 Towns tragedy: Unimaginable loss

Allison Rahmani planned to fly to Paris on Sunday with her husband, to celebrate her 40th birthday. Instead, Matthew Rahmani was eulogizing his wife as an eshet chayil, a woman of valor, and her mother and siblings were describing the light she brought to everyone she touched.

Allison was niftar on Friday after she lost control of her car and it plunged into the in-ground pool at her home on Elinor Road in Hewlett Bay Park.

Authorities believe she may have suffered a sudden medical emergency before losing control of her 2023 GMC SUV, which struck a tree and a 2006 Honda before landing in the pool. They said she was conscious after the accident and called for help, succumbing enroute to the hospital.

Her levaya drew an overflow crowd to the Boulevard-Riverside Chapels in Hewlett on Sunday morning.

A mother of four and the wife of Matthew Rahmani, president of the Irving Place Minyan in Woodmere, Allison was known for her dedication to her students at HAFTR, where she was a teacher and math coordinator.

Matthew described the way she nurtured their children — Nathan, Jake, Zachary and Chloe — “like delicate plants” and said through tears that he would continue to raise them with the love and values she had given them.

After reciting the Eshet Chayil poem on Sunday, Matthew added, “I’m sorry I didn’t say that at her wedding. I can’t imagine more fitting words for the woman you were.”

“We are broken,” said Allison’s mother, Rachelle Rohde. “We will never be the same.”

She told her grandchildren that their mother was watching over them.

HAFTR officials said the school community is grieving Rahmani’s death.

“She loved her students,” said Shayna Unger, a close friend and fellow teacher at HAFTR.

“Ally didn’t teach because she had to, she taught because she loved it,” Unger said. “She loved math. She loved her students. She loved the Ally show. And she genuinely believed that a teacher could change a child’s life.”

“Where someone else saw a difficult child, Ally saw potential,” she continued. “And if a child needed extra help, Ally gave it.”

Unger recalled that after girls in her class lost their mother, Allison set up a hair salon in her classroom to prep them for the day.

“She wanted them to walk into school looking and feeling like every other girl. She wanted their school days to feel as normal as possible.

Unger described her friend as “a person of action.” If she saw a problem and there was something she thought she could do to fix it, she would do it.

Dana Hess told mourners that her sister was “the life of the party” and an educator who taught “because she loved to.”

“Where somebody else saw a difficult child, Ally saw potential,” she shared.

Melissa Berman of the LI Herald contributed to this report.