Rabbi wounded in synagogue shooting says ‘senseless hate’ killings must stop
The rabbi wounded in the shooting at his synagogue in California spoke from the hospital on Sunday to say that it was a miracle he was not dead and that “senseless hate” killings based on religion must stop.
“We are being mown down like animals,” Rabbi Yisroel Goldstein said on Sunday.
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He said he was shot at what would normally be considered point blank range and lost an index finger as he held his hands up in defense – before a congregant and old friend, Lori Gilbert Kaye, hurled herself in front of him and was killed in the attack by a gunman in Poway on Saturday.
“I met the terrorist face to face,” Goldstein said, in a telephone interview from the hospital with CNN’s Brian Stelter, broadcast live on Sunday morning.
“It’s a miracle I was able to survive, using my fingers. It’s not possible to recall exactly what happened, it happened all so quickly,” he said.
The rabbi said he was trying to persuade the doctors to release him from an area hospital but “I have both my hands wrapped up, I can’t even drink a cup of water and I’m in excruciating pain.”
Witnesses have told how he was wounded in the fingers of both hands as he tried to shield himself in the moment of being shot, but that Kaye then intervened, fatally.
“This has to stop,” he said, his voice quavering but passionate. “This has to stop. The US constitution grants freedom of religion to all faiths.”
Reports on Sunday morning said that Kaye’s husband, a doctor, was in the synagogue and when people started being shot, he ran to assist and began performing resuscitation on a fallen woman – before suddenly realizing it was his wife, whereupon he fainted, according to a report on CNN.
Goldstein said Kaye’s daughter was also visiting and had attended synagogue.
“She was there to witness as her mother was lying on the floor dying,” he said.
Goldstein said he had known Kaye for 25 years. “She was always there to help others in their time of need … this beautiful, wonderful, wonderful human being. When people were dying of cancer she would take them to treatment, she would bake, it’s unbelievable,” he said.
The attack came just six months after death and injury were inflicted upon a synagogue in Pittsburgh in an apparent antisemitic, targeted attack.
Goldstein was defiant on Sunday.
“We are fortunate to live here in a country that allows us to live as proud Jews. We are still recovering from the Holocaust, we are being mown down like animals, just like in Nazi Germany, but terror will not win. I am here in the face of senseless hate,” he said.
He said that since he emerged from surgery, his thoughts had been racing.
“Why was my life spared? I was shot, point blank, and I managed to stop it with my index finger, which will for ever be a reminder … to have this happen in 2019, this has to raise the alarm for the safety of our places of worship,”
He added: “I have lived through this horror for a reason. Missing a finger is just a finger but God did not want me to die yesterday and we are all created in the image of God. We all have a mission in this world, we need to take this darkness and bring light.”
While others have made fresh calls for stricter gun control, Goldstein simply said he had wanted to have an armed guard at the synagogue, but did not have the funds.
