Hovav Engelsman after the attack
Hovav Engelsman after the attackHovav Engelsman

Arab terrorists attacked a Jewish man celebrating the Purim holiday as he walked home from the traditional megilla reading with his wife in Jerusalem, the victim reported Sunday. 

On Thursday night, Hovev Engelsman, project coordinator for the Yuvalim project of the World Zionist Organization (WZO), was walking through the Yemin Moshe neighborhood when he was first approached. 

Suddenly, a tall and masked Arab man ran up behind him and grabbed his shirt, shouting for his accomplice to take Engelsman's cell phone. 

Engelsman described the ordeal on his Facebook page. 

"I thought he was joking," he noted. "I could not believe this was happening to me." 

"Since I was I child, I could not agree with the idea of 'street thugs' of any kind, who feel and think they can get whatever they want because they wield power," he added. "This has to do both with my being the grandson of a Holocaust survivor and a combat soldier [in the IDF]." 

As such, Engelsman did not take the attack lying down. He began struggling with his assailant. 

"I was mostly trying to protect myself and to ensure that he wouldn't rob us of anything," he said. "He was in an angry rampage in front of my eyes and I'm trying to digest what is happening. At the same time, my wife is yelling to stop and to simply give him what he asked for." 

"I wouldn't give up, and my wife understood that the situation was deteriorating, and she immediately ran for help," he continued. "Seconds before help arrived, I see that one of the Arabs is holding a screwdriver between his fingers and he began stabbing me. (In hindsight, it turns out that while he kept hitting me with a screwdriver, and my jacket is full of cuts, most of them did not hit my body.)"

Hovev Engelsman, post-attack
Hovev Engelsman, post-attackHovev Engelsman

Engelsman's wife, whom he calls "the heroine of the evening," called out to a group of teenagers nearby. The Arab thought she was speaking to police and fled the scene.

"Because of this, because they got there relatively quickly, I wasn't injured more," he said. 

Engelsman and his wife warned bystanders not to approach the scene of the attack while he also called the Israel Police. 

"Of course, the perpetrator was not caught," he added. 

"It's not safe enough to walk on the streets of Israel at night, especially in Jerusalem and in Judea and Samaria," he concluded. "Therefore, if our lives and the lives of our families are dear to us, we must insist that security forces protect us and that we have the right as basic citizens of the state to our safety - which for some strange reason or another is not the case now."