A New York City rabbi says he's found the answer to fighting participants of the "knockout game": defense.
"If Jewish kids started fighting back, they wouldn't get picked on so much," Gary Moskowitz, an ex-cop who now holds a seventh-degree karate black belt, told the New York Post. "I'm just trying to encourage the Jewish community to do that."
Over the last eight weeks, more than eight Jewish people in Brooklyn were reportedly attacked by people playing what's being called the "knockout game," which calls for assailants to run up behind random strangers on the street and deliver a single sucker-punch. Most of the attackers have been groups of teenagers, and reports of the assaults have recently stretched to New Jersey and New Haven, Conn. Most recently, a Hasidic man walking on a Williamsburg, Brooklyn street on Sunday night was knocked down by a man and woman.
At least one person, a 46-year-old homeless man, died from the impact of hitting the ground.
To Moskowitz, who grew up in the Soundview area of The Bronx in the 60s, beatings like these were the norm growing up.
"I wore a yarmulke, and I was a target," he told the Post. "I was once dragged up six stories to a rooftop by a gang...They held me over the ledge."
When he turned 14, Moskowitz attended a Jewish Defense League-backed summer camp, and learned karate.
"I came back, and I was able to do 400 push-ups," he said. Shortly after he returned, he encountered a man who had attacked him in the past by punching him and urinating on his yarmulke.
"He threw a punch, and it came at me in slow motion. I...brought him down," he recalled to the Post. "I could have hit him, but I didn't. I didn't have to."
After joining the police force in 1982, the Orthodox rabbi now runs a self-defense class in Flushing, Queens.
Authorities recently questioned whether the "knockout game" was, in fact, a dangerous phenomenon, or if the cases were merely some of the random attacks law enforcement deals with almost daily.
