Speaking to CBS in New York, Rabbi Gopin, 63, described how the attacker had swung a rock “with full force towards my head.
“He said ‘Jew, Jew’. He said something in that direction…he was looking to kill. No doubt about it”
The rabbi said the man “jumped on me and start to fight with me, trying to knock me in the face – probably, I would say, 20, 25, 30 times with his fists, and I was protecting myself.”
He described surviving as “a miracle from God”.
Police have released footage of the man believed to be behind the attack on Rabbi Gopin.
New York mayor Bill de Blasio vowed that the city will “stop at nothing to protect our communities from hate and violence.”
But in an opinion piece on the subject for the Forward, local Orthodox resident Avital Chizik-Goldschmidt accused city authorities of having done little beyond “tweets and press releases” to deal with the growing problem.
According to the New York Police Department there have been 145 antisemitic hate crime complaints in the city so far in 2019 – compared to 88 during the same period in 2018.
