Policeman recounts synagogue attack: 'I kept shooting and the terrorist fell'
Master Sergeant Itzik Weizmann was the first policeman on the scene of the deadly attack in Jerusalem; condition of worshiper seriously hurt improving.
Master Sergeant Itzik Weizmann, from the Jerusalem District traffic police, was the first policeman on the scene of the deadly attack at the synagogue in Har Nof. On Wednesday he recounted the trying experience to his family.
Along with his colleagues, including Superintendent A. and Master Sergeant Zidan Saif, he confronted the terrorists and neutralized them. Saif himself was critically hurt and succumbed to his wounds hours later. Weizmann was hit with two bullets to his thigh and is hospitalized in moderate condition in the Shaare Zedek Medical Center.
"I heard an initial report on the police scanner about a shooting at a synagogue. I raced there on my motorcycle even before we thought it was a terrorist attack," he told his family. "Civilians pointed me to the place. I saw a man lying on the stairs at the entrance and I realized I was facing a terror attack.
"Zidan Saif arrived with a policewoman. They were on the right side of the entrance and I was on the left. The terrorist came outside shooting, Zidan was hurt. I kept shooting and the terrorist fell."
The two terrorists - cousins Ghassan and Uday Abu Jamal from Jabel Mukaber in East Jerusalem - entered the Bnei Torah synagogue armed with meat cleavers, guns and knives. They attacked worshipers at the synagogue and the yeshiva attached to it and murdered five people - Saif, Rabbi Moshe Twersky, Rabbi Avraham Shmuel Goldberg, Rabbi Kalman Levine, and Aryeh Kupinsky - before they were taken down.
Weizmann, a father of four and expecting another baby, told his family members that he was acting "out of the desire to save people and get them out of there. I realized there's a serious incident and I had to act as quickly as possible."
According to his brother, who visited him at the hospital, "he could've had many reasons not to go to a place like this. He didn't think. He went straight there. He's not from the counter terrorism unit but he still got there and acted commendably."
Worshiper seriously hurt is recovering
The condition of Shmuel Goldstein, who was seriously wounded in the attack, has significantly improved, and he was also recounting the attack to his doctors at the Hadassah Medical Center in Jerusalem's Ein Kerem.
"He's speaking, communicating and remembering," Shmuel's mother-in-law Tzipora Heller said. "He says he was in the synagogue when all of a sudden shooting started and everyone fell to the floor. His son, Mordechai, ran outside. He saw his son running, followed him and came upon the terrorist who hit him in the head, back and hand. He fell outside and a passerby who saw him bleeding from his head took his shirt and bandaged him.
"Now that he's talking, he described the feeling of facing someone who seems like an ordinary human being, and yet he doesn't mind taking an ax and want to kill people without an ounce of humanity. The word fear doesn't describe it," she added.
On 12-year-old Mordechai she said: "He's perfectly fine considering what he went through, this tragedy. His teacher from school visited him last night and Mordechai told him what happened and even wrote it down. Today he went back to school."
Yafa Rotman, whose father Haim Yechiel Rotman is hospitalized in serious condition at Hadassah Ein Kerem, told reporters that "We're all having a hard time right now. What keeps me and my family going is the support we get from those around us. We shouldn't be afraid to go out on the street, we should be strong and believe it will be okay. It's not natural. I have a four-year-old brother and he shouldn't live in this reality."
Rotman, 53, is a father of 10 who works at the State Comptroller's office. "They told us his injuries indicate that he fought. He didn't just stand there," his daughter went on to say. "I'm expected to be angry, cry and seek revenge but I'm not in that place. That's what they want. For us to go crazy, but no. We will be strong."
