by Canaan Lidor
"Every rabbi in Europe is exposed to the risk of assault whenever they walk down the street,” said the event's organizer, Rabbi Menachem Margolin.
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A guide trains rabbis in krav maga in Eindhoven, the Netherlands on July 22, 2025. Photo credit: RCE. |
Dozens of European rabbis underwent Krav
Maga hand-to-hand combat training in the Netherlands on Tuesday, as part
of the professional training program of the Rabbinical Centre of Europe
(RCE).
The training in the city of Eindhoven was “pretty basic,
teaching community rabbis from across the continent the key moves, in
the hope that they’ll follow up in their own communities,” Akiva
Komisar, a Chabad rabbi from Amsterdam, told JNS.
His Chabad
House in central Amsterdam began offering Krav Maga lessons to community
members after Nov. 8, when dozens of Arab and Muslim men carried out a
coordinated attack on Israeli soccer fans in Amsterdam for a match
between Maccabi Tel Aviv and the Ajax team.
“It was a shock for
the entire community. We thought we were living in a nice, tolerant
place, and suddenly, we found out that we’re living among people who can
turn very violent,” said Kamisar, the 40-year-old father of seven
children. “So the need to train in self-defense really presented
itself,” he added.
Beyond the Netherlands, as well, the surge
of antisemitic attacks after Oct. 7, 2023, means that “every rabbi in
Europe is exposed to the risk of assault whenever they walk down the
street,” said Rabbi Menachem Margolin, the Brussels-based chairman of
the RCE and the European Jewish Association (EJA).
“This is a
true alarm bell for European governments,” added Margolin, who
introduced Krav Maga training also during the EJA’s annual gathering in
2024 in Amsterdam.
Margolin said the security efforts of Jewish communities—ranging from martial arts training to the installation and maintenance of security surveillance apparatus at Jewish community sites—must be complemented by police patrolling and “significantly increased punishments and enforcement for antisemitic attacks.”
At the training session in Eindhoven on Tuesday, an instructor took the group of rabbis outside and paired them for exercises in which they alternated between playing the attacker and the defender.
The idea for the training session came from “many rabbis who fear walking in the streets and feel defenseless, knowing they are vulnerable at any moment to physical attacks,” said Rabbi Aryeh Goldberg, director general of the RCE.
In 2015, following the murder of four Jews by jihadists at the Hyper Cacher kosher supermarket in Paris, Margolin wrote to the interior ministers of European Union member states asking that gun licensing laws be “reviewed with immediate effect to allow designated people in the Jewish communities and institutions to own weapons for the essential protection of their communities.”
Canaan Lidor
Source: https://www.jns.org/european-rabbis-undergo-krav-maga-training-in-the-netherlands/
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