MOSCOW, August 11 (RIA Novosti) — A 60-year-old Brooklyn rabbi Joseph Raksin was shot to death Saturday morning while he was walking to the Miami synagogue, according to local media reports.
Miami-Dade Police are searching for two men who supposedly confronted Raksin.
The attackers managed to escape.
"I saw a man dressed in black on the ground so I went out I asked my son-in-law to call emergency services and we went over there and tried to help the man," CSB Miami quotes Jean Louis Denis, a nearby resident as saying.
"He was coming in and out of consciousness and I talked a little bit to him. He gave me his name, that he was from New York and he told me two males were the people that did this," he added.
Raksin was airlifted to Jackson Memorial Hospital where he later died.
Neighbors said Raksin's son-in-law and grandchildren were walking a few blocks behind him when they heard the shooting.
"The grandchildren heard and saw but did not realize it was their grandfather," Rabbi Moshe Druin told CSB Miami.
Police refute it was a hate crime and say it “appears to be a robbery gone badly.”
The murder comes two weeks after another incident in Miami, when a synagogue in North Miami Beach was vandalized with spray painted swastikas and the word “Hamas.”
On July 8, Israel launched an offensive against the Hamas movements in response to their attacks.
On July 17, after several days of air and naval attacks, the Israeli switched to a ground offensive to destroy the network of Hamas tunnels around the border area.
