When Boaz finished his military service, he was offered several positions others might have jumped at: bodyguard for then prime minister Yitzchak Rabin, and — thanks to his father’s connections — a position with the Mossad in an African country. But after consulting with experts in the field, Boaz decided to turn down both offers, and instead moved ahead upgrading his own operational abilities, furthering his martial-arts training, and working with youth on the fringe. And then came an offer much more up his alley — a job in Paris securing Jewish institutions in different locations with a specially trained defense force.

But before he even got started, a frightening anti-Semitic incident made him realize just how important was the task at hand. It was Shavuos morning and Boaz was davening Shacharis in the shul in Paris’s Barbès Quarter, a closed, lower-class neighborhood with a strong PLO influence. The police themselves rarely entered the area even though there were many poor Jews who lived there alongside the Muslims.

“While we were in shul,” Boaz remembers, “a few Jewish children were outside in the courtyard, when we suddenly heard screams. It turned out that some Muslim youths had arrived and begun taunting and hitting the Jewish children. One of the people in shul at the time was a district judo champion. He was extremely strong, and he hurried outside to help the children. But after a few minutes, Muslim backup arrived and they sprayed his face with insecticide, which felled him. The Muslims then began to beat him, while the rest of the Jews barricaded themselves into the shul. They didn’t even call the police, because they knew there was no chance of them coming.

“For me that incident was a definitive mark of shame. It highlighted the dismal situation of Jews in France — and all of Europe. Two Jewish organizations were supposed to protect the community and its members, but when the hour of reckoning came, they came up short. It pained me to see Jews concealing their Jewish identity, wearing berets instead of yarmulkes and tucking their tzitzis into their pants. They behaved in the free world of the 20th century just like they had in the Middle Ages. I decided to dedicate my life to putting an end to this phenomenon. Look, I knew I wasn’t going to be able to eradicate anti-Semitism, but at least I could help Jews face the challenge with dignity.”

A Plan for Every Plot

Boaz Barr spent the next eight years in Europe and the US, and returned to Israel at the end of the summer of 2000 with his wife and two young daughters. They settled in the yishuv Shavei Shomron, and Boaz began building a network of self-defense courses — and not a moment too soon. He began to smell danger in the air — rumblings of the second intifada which would take the lives of more than 1,000 Jews. The next few years were difficult — the settlements in the Shomron lost some of their prime members in the violent uprising; Boaz alone lost sixteen friends. And so he took a plan he’d once created for the for the security forces regarding civilian protection, updated it, and turned it into an organization called Otzma, the goal of which was to train Jews in Israel and around the world to be able to handle any threat. He then found the ideal partner — David Djaoui — a young French lawyer who’d recently come to Israel and also specialized in self-defense.

David Djaoui was born in France in 1980, yet grew up in Canada and the Far East, where his parents had business interests. And like Boaz, he too began training in martial arts when he was barely out of diapers. In Hong Kong as a teenager though, he discovered another kind of discipline.

“I came from a traditional family, but in Hong Kong I got close to the Chabad shluchim and became a baal teshuvah,” David says. “When we returned to France, I was 17 and shomer mitzvot. I walked around with a yarmulke, but I quickly realized that that was a magnet for the anti-Semitism that began to rear its head in Europe in general and in France in particular at the end of the 1990s.”

David studied for a law degree at the Sorbonne, and at the same time joined the “underground” — the grass-roots security service of the Jewish community in Paris, which since Israel’s Operation Defensive Shield in 2002, faced an unprecedented wave of anti-Semitic attacks.

David made aliyah in 2005 after completing a degree in international and business law, became licensed by the Israel Bar, served in the IDF’s Golani brigade, and worked for the next ten years as legal counsel at the Foreign Ministry. But that was just his day job.

He continued to train, and that’s how he met Boaz Barr. “We clicked from the first minute we met, and soon we were working together, creating self-defense programs tailor-made to the particular threats of different European communities which I was pretty familiar with.”

His legal background has also been put to use for the organization. “We adapt the training to the laws of the country and are careful not to bring weapons into places where they’re prohibited. We teach our teams how to make sure that the law is on your side, how to speak with eyewitnesses, and how to make sure any legal testimony doesn’t end up working against you,” says Djaoui.

Street Safe

David and Boaz have fine-tuned their ability to analyze situations and pinpoint suspicious activity. Their program also incorporates psychological training to condition the brain to register situations, make quick decisions and maintain composure — even if a person has no experience with Krav Maga or any other self-defense technique.

“Even under the best of circumstances, those techniques require years of training, and that won’t do when we need to teach citizens in a short amount of time,” says Djaoui. “So instead we need to engage the mind of the student, to simulate a situation in which he actually feels the stress of an attack. We need to activate the mind before, during, and after an incident.”

The first step, David and Boaz stress, is to start paying attention to your surroundings — and that means taking your eyes off your screen and removing your earplugs at the minimum.

“Analyze your environment and listen to your intuition,” says David. “For instance, ask yourself, ‘Why is this person wearing a raincoat? Why is that guy running?’ We need to start noticing the small details. If you sense danger, cross to the other side of the street… do something in line with what you believe your capabilities to be, and that doesn’t mean jumping the guy with the knife. If you can do that, great, but if not, screaming for help and a phone call can also save lives.”

He says they aren’t trying to make an entire population neurotic, but it’s vital for people to start taking notice of things that can be used for shelter or cover, or as an escape route. And if, G-d forbid, a person finds himself in the middle of an attack?

“Well,” he says, “if you missed the signals, and the knife is already out, then you need to be aggressive, to find that extra measure of strength, to break the paralysis.”

That’s where Otzma’s mind-over-body training kicks in — and why, David explains, it’s not enough to simply watch maneuvers on a video. “Part of our training is to teach the person what it actually feels like to be attacked, to be stressed and panicked, and then work through it instead of freezing up. We make people wear a blindfold in order to get them into a state of panic, which we then help them work through so that they’ll be able to navigate their way through an attack. We walk them through a process, teaching them to expect the unexpected, to be able to get out of the mental freeze and react quickly and make split-second decisions — whether to shout for help, call the police, or work together with others to disarm the attacker.”

Today much of their work is exported to Europe. “The reality today in Europe is that while central Jewish community institutions — such as the big schools, shuls, and community centers — are secured from the inside, the average Jewish pedestrian is exposed to attack,” Boaz explains. “It’s inconceivable that a Jew who goes to pick up his children from kindergarten, take a Shabbos walk with his family, or even ride the Metro should be defenseless.

“Among our customers are large institutions, such as the French SWAT team service, yeshivos and chadarim, and any group that wants to perform the mitzvah of v’nishmartem me’od l’nafshoseichem,” says Boaz.

When the civil war began in Ukraine in 2013, the large shul in Kiev was under guard, but 15 Jews who walked that week from shul to their homes were seriously injured by knife attacks. The president of Keren Hayesod of Ukraine, Rabbi Alexander Levin, begged Boaz and David to come teach the community how to defend themselves, covering the cost himself.

Self-defense comes with its own unique set of halachic issues, such as carrying a weapon on Shabbos, carrying a weapon when there is no eiruv, the order of priority in saving lives, and many other questions. “Our posek in these matters was Harav Shmuel HaLevi Wosner, ztz”l,” says Boaz. “We also work with the Conference of European Rabbis.”

Eyes Open

Over the years, Barr’s own self-defense methods have proven to be lifesaving. When a grenade was tossed into a kindergarten in Shavei Shomron, the teacher, who had participated in a workshop, acted calmly and distanced the children from it until it was neutralized. Another resident of the yishuv who had learned Barr’s maneuvers managed to come up from behind and shoot the terrorist.

Yaakov Binder, another of Barr’s and Djaoui’s trainees, was on reserve duty in Shechem, bent over fixing a flat tire, when he sensed that his revolver was missing. He turned around and discovered, to his horror, a big, fat Arab teen holding his gun and trying to figure out how to shoot him with it. Yaakov took advantage of the split-second delay, and despite being thinner and shorter, he attacked the terrorist, biting him until he bled and dropped the revolver. Yaakov grabbed his gun back and shot the terrorist.

Boaz shares another incident, this one closer to home. “The secretary of our organization knows our syllabus and has sat in on so many workshops, but she never imagined she’d actually need that knowledge,” Boaz relates. “She was on an Egged bus traveling to Har Chomah on Jerusalem’s southern edge, when she noticed that an Arab, wearing a big coat and holding a heavy bag, had boarded. His body language radiated tension, and, convinced he had a bomb, she went over to the driver and told him she was sure there was a terrorist on the bus. But the driver just told her to sit down and leave him alone. She held her own though, this time raising her voice a notch, and the driver finally relented and opened the doors so everyone could run off. The terrorist, alarmed by the turn of events, also ran away, leaving his heavy bag on the bus. The driver took it and tossed it into a nearby wadi — where the entire bus heard it explode seconds later.”

Self Defense 101

David Djaoui offers a few basic rules to benefit anyone at any time, and any place:

• Stay aware of your surroundings. Walk straight, with your head up and shoulders firm. A lowered head and slumped shoulders radiate weakness and mark a person as an easy target.
• Walk in the center. It’s better to walk in the middle of the sidewalk and not to hug the wall. The logic is simple: if someone is lurking in a corner, you will see him first. If you walk at the outer side of the street, you will be more exposed.
• Maintain maximal alertness: Keep hands outside of pockets, in an effort to gain the most reaction time; eyes straight ahead, and not on the screen of your phone.
• Maintain tactical communication: Sometimes, violence begins with verbal aggression from a provocation, when an attacker tries to attract attention and draw the person into a conversation. Therefore, it is necessary to answer, so as not to radiate weakness, but without entering their court and without acting as expected. It’s much better to throw out an irrelevant sentence in order to throw the assailant off guard, and then to continue walking.
• Leave a window of opportunity: The minute you identify an attack, try to leave the arena by turning around — or if you have a physical advantage, by attacking the attacker in order to momentarily weaken him — and take advantage of that moment to call for help or run.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 645)