(JTA) — Intruders attacked a rabbi and his wife and hurled anti-Semitic insults during a robbery at a Jewish community center and synagogue in Kenya.
Five men assaulted Rabbi Shmuel Notik and his wife, Chaya, Tuesday night, stealing computers, passports, food and religious items from their Nairobi center, Ynet reported.
Chaya Notik was moderately injured, requiring surgery. The rabbi was lightly injured.
The robbers bound two yeshiva students who were present at the center and beat the rabbi after he tried to call police. They attacked the rabbi’s wife with sticks, threatening to kill her in her bedroom and hurling anti-Semitic slurs at her, according to the report. She fled to the bathroom with her children and locked the door behind her, remaining there until police arrived, according to Ynet.
Nairobi, the capital of Kenya and its largest city, has one of the world’s highest crime rates.
Notik and his wife settled there in 2014. Days after their arrival, the rabbi was mugged when six men armed with knives intercepted him on a dark street.
Notik — a follower of the Chabad-Lubavitch stream of Judaism who had moved to Kenya to serve local Jews just days prior to that incident in 2014 — gave the assailants his prayer book and a lapel pin, along with his shofar, the ceremonial horn that Jews blow on Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year.
