A rabbi and his wife were injured in Kenya during a violent assault at their Jewish community center and synagogue, which serves as their home, in what they said was a robbery featuring anti-Semitism.

Five men beat up Rabbi Shmuel Notik and his wife Chaya Tuesday night, stealing computers, passports, food and religious items from their center in Nairobi, the Ynet news site reported.

Chaya Notik was moderately injured, requiring surgery. The rabbi was lightly injured.

The robbers bound two yeshiva students who were present at the Jewish community centre. They beat the rabbi after he tried to call police. The robbers beat the rabbi’s wife with sticks, threatening to kill her in her bedroom and hurling anti-Semitic insults at her, according to the report. She fled to the bathroom with her children and locked the door behind her, remaining there until police arrived, according to Ynet.

Nairobi has one of the world’s highest crime rates.

Notik and his wife settled in Nairobi in 2014. Days after their arrival, he was mugged in the Kenyan capital of Nairobi when six men armed with knives intercepted him on a dark street.

Notik — a follower of the Chabad-Lubavitch stream of Judaism who had moved to Kenya to serve local Jews just days prior to that incident in 2014 — gave the assailants his prayer book and a lapel pin, along with his shofar, the ceremonial horn that Jews blow on Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year.

Kenya: Photos, Chabad Shaliach

and his wife were brutally attacked early this morning inside their home in Nairobi, documents, phones and computers taken, no arrests pic.twitter.com/H5mHlHscbE — Yiddish News (@YiddishNews) April 24, 2019

Source: JTA