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Sunday, December 1, 2013

NY - Karate Rabbi wants to train Jewish kids to combat ‘knockout’ thugs


He wants to pump Jew up! A cop-turned-rabbi is on a quest to toughen up city Jews being targeted by “knockout” thugs.

“If Jewish kids started fighting back, they wouldn’t get picked on so much,” said Gary Moskowitz, a seventh-degree karate black belt. “I’m just trying to encourage the Jewish community to do that.”

In the past two months, at least eight Jews, all in Brooklyn, have allegedly been attacked by punks playing the “knockout game,” in which bystanders are sucker-punched.

As one of the few Jewish kids living in the Soundview section of The Bronx in the 1960s, Moskowitz, 56, took a lot of beatings.

“I wore a yarmulke, and I was a target,” he said. “I was once dragged up six stories to a rooftop by a gang . . . They held me over the ledge.”

But at 14, he went to a Jewish Defense League-sponsored summer camp and was taught karate.
“I came back, and I was able to do 400 push-ups,” he recalled.

Soon after, he came across a bully who had earlier beaten him up and peed on his yarmulke.

“He threw a punch, and it came at me in slow motion. I . . . brought him down,” he said. “I could have hit him, but I didn’t. I didn’t have to. It was like angels were singing.”

He became a cop in 1982 and earned the name “Rambowitz” for his grit.

Now an Orthodox rabbi, he teaches self-defense out of a dojo in Flushing.

In one recent session, he told his young students — his “Savage Skullcaps”— it isn’t size that wins fights.

“These are all physics tricks,” he said.

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