At a Jewish conference in Amsterdam, participants pair up and face one another before one of them lunges at the other one with a butter-knife, prompting the unarmed person to holler “Stop!” and block the attack.
The activity is part of self-defense training led by an Israel-born security expert from Belgium for about 200 participants — many of them older than 60 –- of a conference focused on fighting antisemitism.
The participants, several of them husband and wife, practice repeatedly for about 20 minutes how to defend against a knife attack.
“It’s good to train but it’s crazy that it’s necessary,” says Ellen van Praag, a vice chairwoman of the European Jewish Association, the Brussels-based lobby group that organized the conference in Amsterdam, titled Fighting Back for Our Future.