‘Nothing is going to knock me down’: Toronto yeshiva boys fight off anti-Semitic thugs

“I’m still a proud Jew, and nothing is going to knock me down,” asserted one of the teens who fought back against an anti-Semitic mob.

By Adina Katz, World Israel News

In a suburban Jewish neighborhood near a Jewish school in Toronto, four visibly Jewish teenagers were attacked Sunday in what police are investigating as a hate crime.

“They were being made fun of based on what they were wearing,” Toronto police spokesperson Katrina Arrogante told CP24, a local news station.

“As soon as they spotted us – you know, it’s hard to miss us [as Jews] with the way we are dressed – they started chanting things and screaming things and harassing us,” one of the victims told CP24.

“As a Jew and as a religious Jew, as an observant Jew in Canada, which officially accepts all religions, all races, everybody, to be attacked physically just because I’m a minority is a thing that should have been part of history,” he said.

“I’m very offended but I’m still a proud Jew, and nothing is going to knock me down because we sometimes have to go through it and it makes us stronger,” a second boy told the media outlet.

Boys used IDF self-defense techniques

COLlive, a New York-based Orthodox Jewish community news service, reported the story, and comments posted below the article included advice to Jews to learn to fight back.

The mother of one of the boys responded, telling the readers not to “make false assumptions and play Monday quarterback without knowing the facts.”

It was because two of the boys, including her son, had some training in krav maga, a military self-defence and fighting system developed for the IDF, “that the outcome was not far, far worse than it was,” she explained.

“The thug kid who remains in police custody, the leader of the pack, so to speak, WAS given a serious, but not life-threatening, blow….

“I’m so grateful to Hashem (God) and proud of my son and the other bochurim (young men) for drawing on the training he’d had,” she said, adding that “it was nothing short of a miracle that this far-outnumbered group of yeshiva boys was really ‘only’ roughed up.”

Police are searching for suspects. One of them, apparently the leader of the mob, is in custody.