Two Orthodox Jewish men were attacked and seriously beaten in Berkeley during what they described as an unprovoked attack in the early morning hours of April 4.
Yossi Ferris, a 20-year-old community college student studying in Santa Monica and the eldest son of Chabad of Berkeley’s Rabbi Yehuda Ferris, was returning from a 2 a.m. walk to Telegraph Avenue when he bumped into family friend Shneor Zalman Stern, 50, close to the Ferrises’ Claremont Avenue home. Stern was leaving a dinner there on the eighth night of Passover.
After chatting for about five minutes, both men noticed a muscular black man standing about 35 feet away, who approached them and politely asked Ferris, “Perhaps you could spare a cigarette?”
As Ferris fished in his pocket, the man attacked without warning, according to both victims.
“He began pummeling Yossi in the face as Yossi offered him a cigarette. He forced Yossi backwards. He was very skillful in landing his punches. Yossi tried to block his punches, but I don’t think he succeeded in blocking even one punch,” said Stern.
“He was a highly skilled boxer. You could see he was aiming his punches, and changing the angle of his punches. He was using a karate punch. He knew what he was doing.”
Because the attacker never made any anti-Jewish statements, the Berkeley Police Department is treating the incident as a “strong-arm robbery and assault,” according to Lt. Cynthia Harris, the department’s public information officer.
Both victims are uncertain whether they were on the receiving end of a hate crime, but, Stern points out, “the fact is, he did attack two Jews and he was unrelenting when we offered to give him anything he wanted.” Whether the attack was motivated by escalating violence in the Mideast is, according to Stern, “a concern we all have.”
Ferris, who says he is not identifiably Jewish, and Stern, who was wearing a traditional black hat and long coat, described the attacker as standing about 5-foot-7 and possessing a “fine physique.” Ferris stands about 6-foot-3 and weighs around 160 pounds, while Stern is 6-feet-tall and weighs just 145 pounds.
Both men screamed at the attacker to stop, that they would give him anything he wanted, but he was reportedly unfazed. After Stern forearmed the attacker in the face, Ferris was eventually able to break free and run toward his family home to call for help. The attacker took off after him, with Stern following behind.
“I screamed to him that this was a Jewish holiday and we had nothing of any value on us, and we would give him anything he wanted,” recalled Stern. “He turned toward me and raced toward me as if to tackle me.”
Stern shouted that he would give the attacker “everything I’ve got,” to which the attacker sardonically replied, “OK, give me everything you got,” said Stern, and kept fighting. Also, at one point in the attack, Stern pulled his pockets inside out to demonstrate he had no money, so “his motivation didn’t seem to be mugging us.”
Stern said he managed to block some of the attacker’s blows, but soon found himself pinned to the ground. While he partially deflected some of the punches, he still took a number of shots to the forehead, rendering his face “a bloody mess.”
“I was screaming ‘someone call the police!’ at the top of my lungs. I screamed at him, I said, ‘Take my clothes, just let me live,'” recalled Stern. “It occurred to me that he might have been trying to kill me.”
A neighbor frantically trying to open his window accidentally shattered it, breaking the attacker’s concentration. Stern managed to wriggle free, and received a few kicks to the head before people running from the Ferris home induced the attacker to first nonchalantly walk, then sprint, from the scene.
Stern estimated the entire encounter took about four minutes and believes he spent at least 30 seconds pinned to the ground. The currently unemployed high-tech worker spent the night in Alta Bates hospital with lacerations on his forehead and a possible broken nose.
Ferris isn’t certain he was on the receiving end of a hate crime, postulating that the man may have followed him back from Telegraph Avenue.
“My gut feeling is, I don’t think it was a hate crime. My dad got mugged in the exact same place before, and that was just a mugging,” he said. “My face looks like a mashed potato. But I got away real easy — I just feel lucky he didn’t knife or shoot me. I was stupid; it was late and I should have walked away. I was all nice and I shouldn’t have been.”
Stern, however, is more inclined to believe the incident was a hate crime.
“That’s my sense of it. But how can you tell what a man’s motives are if he doesn’t express them? The only motivation I can see is he wanted to either knock us unconscious or kill us,” he said. “He never made any slanders. He never said anything, basically. He systematically beat the pulp out of us.”