A Car Ramming. A Gun Jamming. Rewind to an Erev Pesach Miracle

Photos Elchanan Kotler, Flash90, Motti Simon

Millions of people around the world saw the horrific early-morning Erev Pesach security footage: A white car plows into a group of bochurim on a streetcorner and sends them flying through the air and landing with a thud meters away, while two terrorists emerge from the vehicle and aim a submachine gun toward their prey… until the weapon jams and they flee into one of the nearby buildings, where they’re eventually hunted down by an Israeli SWAT team.

Now, ahead of Pesach Sheini, the “day of second chances,” Mendy, Yehuda, and Yoeli Fisch, three Breslov chassidic brothers who were standing on the corner of Techeles Mordechai Street and somehow survived the ramming, are making a personal accounting of their merits and sharing the immense gratitude in the Heavenly Hashgachah and compassion that placed them squarely in the center of a pre-Pesach miracle.

It was around 7:50 a.m., and the early risers had already davened and were making their way to the large dumpster that the municipality placed across from the Nachalas Akiva shul on Rechov Techeles Mordechai (which shares the ground-level entrance of the Ganei Geula residential complex) to burn the neighborhood chometz. Others were hurrying off to Shacharis or to siyumim to exempt firstborns from fasting.

Nachalas Akiva, with its many nooks and rooms, actually serves as the neighborhood shtiblach in addition to its main shul, drawing crowds at all hours of the day. On Erev Pesach, most people are in a hurry to finish davening, and at this early hour, the shtiblach inside were full.

At ten minutes to eight, though, it was still pretty early for the crowds to converge to burn the chometz — which was fortunate, because the terrorists looking for a large gathering didn’t find one so early. Had they waited another hour, the street would have been packed.

Mendy, Yehuda, and Yoeli Fisch (who’d been up the entire night cleaning their sister’s apartment and had just finished davening), and their friends Moishy and Yossi Hirschenbaum were standing outside the shul when, seemingly out of nowhere, a white car came careening down the quiet street. As the terrorists inside noticed a few yeshivah bochurim standing on the corner talking, the driver floored the gas and the car darted straight toward them.

The intensity of the impact was huge: Three of the bochurim — Mendy Fisch and the two Hirschenbaum boys — were hurled into the air, each one flying in a different direction. Mendy and his friend Yossi — badly bruised and bleeding but still conscious — noticed something even more frightening as they tried to get their bearings on the concrete: After crashing into a parked car, the terrorists emerged and ran into the street, one of them with a knife and the other with a machine gun, aiming straight at them. Meanwhile, Yehuda ran to Mendy and by some miracle, was able to help him stagger up, the two of them making a run for the shul. Yossi Hirschenbaum also miraculously pulled himself up and ran, while Moishy, who was thrown the farthest, lay unconscious where he landed in a nearby parking lot.

But the gun, a home-fashioned makeshift Carlo rifle, had malfunctioned. The terrorists could have ditched the weapon at the outset and run toward their victims with the knife, but instead wasted precious seconds trying to get the gun to un-jam. After a few futile tries, they dropped it and made their own escape run between the neighborhood buildings, eventually finding a short-lived refuge in the shopping center on the next block.