A 19-year-old rabbinical student was verbally and physically assaulted in Boca Raton, Florida last Saturday, according to reports Wednesday.
WPTV Channel 5 said the student was walking on 2nd Street when the assailant, riding a blue mountain bike, shouted at him that "Jews should go back to Auschwitz. Hitler was right."
The young man, who is studying for his rabbinic ordination at the Boca Raton Chabad center, allegedly then replied: "Why don’t you come back here and say that?”
The cyclist rode back up to the rabbinical student, repeated the anti-Semitic remark, and then began to strike the young Jewish man, who hit his head on the pavement before his assailant fled.
The unnamed victim told Channel 5 that he was still shaken by the incident.
“I’m doing better,” he said. “It was just a little bit nerve-wracking having someone scream at me these things.”
Chabad’s Rabbi Ruvi New called such harassment unusual for the town, and said the Jewish community was "in disbelief. Shock. Could this really happen in Boca Raton?”
Local police are investigating the attack as a possible anti-Semitic hate crime.