Rabbi Yisroel Goldstein was walking into the banquet hall at Chabad of Poway on Saturday when he heard a loud noise. He thought a table had toppled or that one of his congregants had fallen.
Poway, California — Rabbi Yisroel Goldstein was walking into the banquet hall at Chabad of Poway on Saturday when he heard a loud noise. He thought a table had toppled or that one of his congregants had fallen.
“I did not know what that was,” he said. But when he turned around, he immediately found out.
“I was face to face with this murder terrorist who was holding the rifle and looking straight at me,” he said.
The gunman did not say anything.
“As soon as he saw me, he started to shoot toward me and that is when I put my hands up,” Goldstein said.
In an interview on the “Today” show Sunday, Goldstein recounted the harrowing moments when the gunman entered the synagogue in Poway, California, and opened fire with an AR-15-style gun.
“My fingers got blown away,” Goldstein said. “I cannot erase that face from my mind.”
The shooting at Chabad of Poway was the most recent in a string of deadly attacks at houses of worship, including a mass shooting at a mosque in New Zealand in March that was livestreamed on Facebook and fatal bombings at churches in Sri Lanka on Easter Sunday that killed more than 300 people.
The attack at Chabad of Poway happened six months to the day after one of the deadliest attacks against the American Jewish community killed 11 in a Pittsburgh synagogue.
