Brave rabbi with deep B’klyn roots

When a hate-filled gunman opened fire inside his suburban San Diego synagogue, Rabbi Yisroel Goldstein kept his cool.

The brave cleric continued preaching the Passover holiday’s message of freedom, even after being shot in the hand.

“He continued his speech,” Minoo Anvari, a congregant whose husband was inside the synagogue, told CNN. “We are strong. We are united. They can’t break us.”

The founding rabbi of the Chabad of Poway synagogue has deep roots in Brooklyn.

Goldstein has served as a chaplain for the San Diego County sheriff ’s department.

A 2006 profile on the Crown Heights. info website describes Goldstein as warm and talkative, with a philosophy of active community involvement. “I’m on a mission,” Goldstein told the website. “This rabbi is not a business, not a career. It’s a mission.” His father, Yossi, who died in 2013, helped build the Chabad

movement in Crown Heights and was a key lieutenant of

much-revered Rebbe Menachem Schneerson. “Uncle Yossi” was an educator and administrator for dec

ades at several Jewish schools in New York. He and his wife

moved to Poway after retiring to be near their rabbi son. More police than usual flooded the bustling streets of Crown Heights on Saturday night — especially near the Chabad group’s headquarters on Eastern Parkway. Community members expressed shock. Many learned about the tragedy only after the Sabbath ended.

Sam Goldstein, 36 — no relation to the rabbi — said he visited the San Diego-area synagogue as a child. “He’s a real man,” he said of Goldstein. “He’s always been a special person.”

“It’s definitely a hate crime,” said Moishe Tzvi Faistma. “The question is, what is being hated?” asked Faistma.

“Is it hatred of the individual person or what the person stands for?” Faistma said Goldstein “is a representative of certain values, wholesome values, doing good things for fellow citizens. There are people who have an issue with those values.”