PARIS (EJP)—A rabbi aggressed Satuday morning with his 19-year-old son and 44-year-old friend by a man presented as ‘’drunk and mentally unstable’’ told weekly magazine Actualité Juive that while he appeared to have been tipsy, the perpetrator ‘’was not crazy.”
The aggressor lunged at his victims walking to a local synagogue with a knife, after hurling anti-Semitic epithets at them and mumbling “Allahu Akbar.”
Wanting to set the record straight, and to “restore some truth,” the rabbi was responding to what he considers to be misleading reports in the French press about the attack.
The assailant knew exactly whom he was going after, the rabbi said. The location – outside of the Minhat Chalom synagogue on Shabbat morning – was not coincidental. “It’s because my son and I have beards and wear hats that we were attacked,” he said.
No less disturbing to the rabbi was the reaction of witnesses to the bloody scene. “We were attacked next to a café,” he recounted. “Patrons were there, but none intervened.”
