Gedalia Ben Shimon, deputy mayor of Bnei Brak turned chairman of the Ramat Gan religious council, sat down for his first interview since surviving a terror stabbing four months ago, telling the Kikar FM podcast that waking from a medically induced coma to read his own eulogies changed how he understands every single morning since.
The attack happened in Adar, during a tense stretch of the war with Iran, as Ben Shimon's office prepared local restaurants for Passover. A siren sent him to a nearby parking area, since the religious council building has no bomb shelter. On his walk back, a four minute route he had taken countless times, he passed a man in a hoodie sitting on a bench reading from a Quran. He felt a flicker of unease but kept walking toward the building doors.
The man had risen and followed him. A meter from the entrance, the terrorist attacked from behind, stabbing him in the back while shouting Allahu Akbar. Ben Shimon has described those forty seconds as the most brutal a person can experience, saying his children's faces flashed before him as he made peace with God mid-attack.
Stabbed in the liver, a lung, and his spine, and with no combat training or weapon, Ben Shimon made a split second tactical decision: he deliberately dropped to the ground to create a height gap that kept the blade away from his face and hands, then fought back with his legs until a passing motorcyclist's sudden arrival startled the attacker into fleeing.
What followed was, in Ben Shimon's telling, a chain of small miracles. A paramedic who happened to work in Ichilov Hospital's operating wing routed him directly to the correct surgical team. Shas chairman Aryeh Deri left a security cabinet meeting to fly to the hospital and marshal the hospital's top specialists. For nearly a week, Ben Shimon remained sedated and on a ventilator while communities around the world prayed for his recovery.
When he woke, he assumed he had only lost a day, then learned nearly a full week had passed. Surrounded by machines and convinced he was dying, he gave his son what he believed were his final instructions, telling him to look after his mother and to keep moving forward without waiting for him. Once his phone was returned to him, he opened messaging groups filled with tributes written in his memory, describing the disorienting experience of reading eulogies for himself while still alive.
Ben Shimon was direct in the interview about the psychological toll that has followed the physical recovery, saying he has been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress and describing the ongoing fear triggered by the sound of a kitchen knife or an unexpected touch to his back. He said the mind is fragile enough that a brutal, repeated stabbing wounds it just as the body is wounded, and that he is actively working on that healing rather than letting the attacker win psychologically as well as physically.
The interview closed with a moment Ben Shimon called a full circle. On Israel's Memorial Day, still bandaged and in pain, Ramat Gan Mayor Carmel Shama-Hacohen invited him to climb the stage in the same square where he was stabbed and read a chapter of Psalms in front of thousands. He described returning to that spot not as a victim but as a survivor giving public thanks, with the message aimed squarely at the attacker now sitting in prison.
Ben Shimon closed the interview with a message for anyone listening who is facing hardship of their own: to look for the opportunity inside every difficulty, and not to let the crisis run them, but to run the crisis instead.
