“I whispered ‘are you ready to go?’” Walker-Cytron recalled in a Zoom interview with The Jerusalem Post on Thursday. “I didn’t care if the gunmen heard.”
“For the day of the Lord upon all the nations is near;
As you have done, it shall be done to you;
Your reprisal shall return upon your own head.” Obadiah 1:15
The perpetrator’s gun “was not in a good position,” so Cytron-Walker threw a chair at him, distracting him. Then he ran with the other hostages through a nearby exit door, he said, recalling the moments they fled Congregation Beth Israel, where he has been the rabbi for 15 years.
He said there was a one-in-a-billion chance that the man who walked through his synagogue door seeking help while they were in the building to hold Saturday morning Sabbath services on a live feed would actually be a gunman that would take him and three others hostage.