Posted on 07/04/2008 8:39:49 AM PDT by Alouette
"We were on our way to the museum with the kids when we suddenly saw a bunch of construction workers run frantically out of the construction site," Rick Eissenstat said Thursday.
The father of three who immigrated with his family from Baltimore, Maryland, four years ago, said God saved them from Jerusalem's bulldozer-driving terrorist.
"The guy was driving about 30 miles an hour, probably the maximum speed that bulldozer could go," Eissenstat continued. "I tried to back up to get out of the way but cars behind me blocked me."
"The right wheel of the bulldozer crushed a taxi cab and the left wheel crushed our Mazda. He saw that he did not kill [us]. I looked at him and he looked at me. And all that I could think was, 'How do I get my family out of this.'
"Then he put the bulldozer in reverse. He wanted to finish off the job. He ran us over us again. But nothing happened to us.
"Then he lowered the shovel on us and began crushing the roof of the car. My daughter Nechama put her arm over her head to protect herself.
"For reasons unknown to us Hashem did not let him kill us. I think he [the terrorist] realized that and decided to move on to someone else."
Eissenstat believes he and his family might have merited being saved as a result of their donations to the Chabad Terror Victims Project.
"Last year [at] this time we were visiting terrorist victims in Sderot," he said.
Rabbi Menachem Kutner, head of the Chabad project, said he was certain the Eissenstats' salvation was in part a result of their charity to terror victims.
"Eissenstat and his family were unique donors," Kutner said. "They did not just write a check and send it, they themselves visited the terrorist victims. They involved themselves, using their feet to walk from victim to victim and their hands to comfort the injured.
"Because they used their bodies to perform the mitzva of visiting the sick, Hashem protected their bodies from the terrorist."
Despite her narrow escape, Nechama, who turns 14 next week, said she wasn't sorry about her family's decision to immigrate to Israel.
"I am happy to be here in the Land of Israel," she said.
Warning! This is a high-volume ping list.
I was really impressed by the actions of the two men who stopped the incident by jumping up on the bulldozer and killing the terrorist. There wasn’t any hesitation or vacillation, or soul-searching or agonizing on their part—they knew what they had to do, and, transcending fear, they did it.
The other people killed, not so much.
Whatever.
Funny how most of the media outlets are not calling this terrorism. Just a random act.
If we flashed forward 50 years to Idiocracy, no doubt we would see a Mazda commercial touting cage strength on their vehicles as evidenced by this survival tale. Not trying to be flip. Just pointing out what’s I feel is wrong in the free world today. Too many people chasing money above all else. The more we chase, the poorer we are becoming.
Happy Freedom Day.
Is there no one anywhere in journalism who knows the difference between a rubber tired loader and a bulldozer??? Good grief, the story is a few days old already and I haven’t seen anyone get it right yet.
Thanks for posting, nice to know folks still have faith in Hashem (embarasinly I had to look up - many Jewish people will call God “Hashem”, which is Hebrew for “the Name” (this appears in Leviticus 24:11)
I have faith and also believe that the helping hand of the Lord is at the end of my own arm.
If this cat could hace “looked at the terrorist” he could have emptied a magazine load of hollow points into the SOB (pig dung upon him) as well.
I’m just saying.....
With a few notable exceptions, there’s nobody in journalism who knows ANYTHING. Or cares. Fact checking? What’s that?
But at least he sympathetically reported the story of what happened to this family and their narrow escape from death.
And who knows? If the terrorist hadn’t backed up and tried again, but instead had driven straight on, maybe he would have killed a lot more people before he was brought down. So maybe it wasn’t just this one family that was saved from death.
So God saved them, but caused the deaths of the others? Give me a break. Let’s focus on the job at hand—retribution. Destroy the family’s home and deport them all to Ramallah—NOW! Cordon off the Arab areas of Jerusalem, and evict and deport all squatters of illegal homes.
The Lord saves!
In fairness to the journo, most readers think of any piece of earthmoving equipment as a “bulldozer.”
If he had used correct terminology, they wouldn’t have had a clue what he was talking about. A forklift?
Nah, only us cretins who actually work for living.
This is driving me nuts, too. What's so hard about saying "payloader" instead of bulldozer?
I am glad to know this was bothering you guys as well. Being a former dozer operator who also has some hours on front end loaders it was driving me nuts that todays journalists are so f’in stupid.
However, the guy could not have flipped over a bus so easily with a bulldozer.
Irregardless, I am glad the posted subject was not steamrolled :^)
Rick Eissenstat and his family were saved in order to say Baruch HaShem.
It wasn't a steam roller either. (How do you roll steam?)
For the record, it wasn’t a bulldozer, but a wheeled bucket loader. A bulldozer crawler tractor won’t go 30 mph.
Technically a bulldozer is the slightly curved blade on the front of the tractor. The tractor may be wheeled, or more commonly a tracked vehicle.
That is all.
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