Arutz Sheva met with Rabbi Victor Attia, who not only heads the Chabad House in Kiryat Arba-Hevron, but also performs magic tricks.

“A while ago I met a person who introduced me to the interesting world of magic,” he recalled. “As part of my work with soldiers and children I usually try to bring in the artists to make the people happy, but one time I saw someone performing a magic trick during a show abroad and I liked it and saw the people being hypnotized by it. So I said that it would be a good idea to use magic to make people happy.”

Rabbi Attia emphasized that his “magic” is not real and that his true purpose is to connect between Jews, entertain people and make them happy.

“I perform tricks, a kind of ‘mind reading’, and add Jewish content to it, using words that are more suitable to our public when possible,” he explained.

He added that there is no real ‘magic’ but rather that it’s all about “quickness of hands, it’s acquired knowledge, it’s a bit of intuition, it’s a combination of many things but nothing beyond that. It’s all things that if you practice a bit and have the knowledge, you can do it. And that’s essentially what I do.”