FRANKFURT (EJP)— A 42-year-old rabbi was attacked and seriously wounded Friday night in the western German city of Frankfurt, by an unknown person who stabbed him, police said.
Rabbin Zalman Gurevitch of the Chabad-Lubavitch community of Frankfurt, was walking home from the synagogue in the street of the city along with two friends when he was attacked by a man who first threatened him before stabbing him in the stomach.
Rabbin Zalman Gurevitch of Chabad-Lubavitch in Frankfurt (1st row, 3d from the L).
Severely wounded, the rabbi could reach a nearby hospital where he was operated and is said to be in “stable condition.”
His days are out of danger but he will have to stay hospitalized until after Roch Hachana, the Jewish New Year, his nephew, Rabbi Mendel Gurewitz from Offenbach, told EJP.
According to the rabbi’s friends, the aggressor, who was accompanied by two women, was apparently coming “from a southern country.” He first shouted “something in Arabic” at the victim, they told police.
When the rabbi asked him what he wanted, the aggressor threatened him in German before stabbing him. After the attack, the aggressor and the two women fled in different directions.
According to police, it was unlikely to be a premeditated aggression.
* One wonders why the police would make such a statement.
The police promised a 2.000-euro reward for any indication allowing the arrest of the culprit.
Roland Koch, Prime Minister of the regional state of Hesse, deplored the stabbing as “a perfidious deed that we can only view with horror and indignation and most strongly condemn.”
He expressed the hope that the aggressor would be quickly arrested.
Olmid Nouripour, the Frankfurt representative of the Green party at the Bundestag, the federal parliament, said: “It is frightening that for Jews in Germany there is still no normality in the everyday life, given the multiculturality of the city of Frankfurt.”
He asked the Muslim community to be stronger involved in the fight against anti-Semitism.
* Fat chance. But perhaps we should rejoice that it wasn’t a Nazi who did it after all?
Or does a German look like this?
Phantom picture of the assassin
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Seems like a case of a rattus norvegicus trying to rid us of rattus rattus. In the end a plague is a plague. Whether you wear a fedora with your beard or a turban with your beard we don’t distinguish you are all the same to us.