“We didn’t have time to react at all,” he said.
“I grabbed an old antique coffee table and I threw it at his face,” another witness, Josef Gluck, 32, recounted.
The attacker fled. He then tried to break into the Congregation Netzach Yisroel synagogue next door but the congregants, having heard the screams from Rabbi Rottenberg’s house, bolted themselves inside.
Five people were injured, one of them with a serious skull fracture, in last Saturday night’s knife attack in Monsey, a small town with a large Jewish population northwest of New York City.
Dozens of people were in the house to mark the penultimate night of Chanukah. One of the victims is believed to be the rabbi’s son.
The suspect, 37-year-old Grafton Thomas, from the nearby village of Greenwood Lake, was stopped by police later that night in Harlem, Manhattan, a 45-minute drive away.
Officers said he had blood all over his clothing and smelled distinctly of bleach.
He said “almost nothing” when he was stopped but has since pleaded not guilty to five charges of attempted murder and a charge of burglary.
He also faces a charge of racial hatred after investigators found journals in his home referring to Jews and antisemitism.
A statement issued by Mr Thomas’s family said he had a history of mental illness and hospitalisations but “no known history of antisemitism”.
Irrespective of the alleged motive, last Saturday’s attack, hours after the end of Shabbat, capped an awful year for America’s Jewish community.
2019 was already the year in which antisemitism in the United States claimed lives: Lori Gilbert Kaye died in April’s shooting on a San Diego synagogue at Pesach, while local officials said a kosher supermarket was deliberately targeted in the Jersey City gun attack on December 10 that claimed the lives of a police officer, a store employee and two Jews.
But there have been scores of other non-fatal incidents, particularly in New York and New Jersey, and Strictly Orthodox Jews have been the most affected.
The Anti-Defamation League says there has been an “alarming increase in the frequency and aggressiveness” of assaults that are violent, random and seemingly unprovoked. Incidents in Brooklyn are being reported almost as a matter of routine.
“Where is the outrage?” Jewish journalist Batya Ungar-Sargon asked on Twitter last week, after three attacks were reported in a single day. “Where are the politicians? Where is the plan to protect them? Frum Jews’ lives are ‘hefker’ — up for grabs — and no one cares.”
Monsey was “at least” the tenth antisemitic attack in the New York area in just the last week, the ADL said.
New York governor Andrew Cuomo said the latest stabbings were an act of “domestic terrorism” and announced increased police patrols in Orthodox Jewish neighbourhoods across the state.
But for some, the measures are not enough.
“Simply stated, it is no longer safe to be identifiably Orthodox in the State of New York,” said four Orthodox Jewish politicians in a letter to the governor this week. “We cannot shop, walk down a street, send our children to school, or even worship in peace.”
They want Mr Cuomo to appoint a special prosecutor assigned specifically to perpetrators of antisemitic violence. He has not yet committed to the move.
Footage shared on Twitter showed members of the congregation in the synagogue, minutes after chasing away the Monsey knifeman, to pray and sing.
The Orthodox Jewish Public Affairs Council’s Twitter account offered a rough translation of what they sang: “The grace of God did not end and his mercy did not leave us.”
But as the old decade ends, they find themselves living in a country more hostile to them than when it began
