Shalom Dovber Levy, a Jewish man stabbed in an antisemitic attack in 2016. Photo: Courtesy of Sterna Moyal.

The daughter of a French Jewish man stabbed by an antisemitic Islamist shouting “Allahu Akbar” three-and-a-half years ago believes her father’s recent death was a direct result of the trauma he endured.

Shalom Dovber Levy, an Orthodox Jew and thus visibly Jewish, was attacked in Strasbourg, France, in August 2016 as he walked home from a kosher shop after buying Shabbat groceries. The Algemeiner reported at the time that the assailant threw his arm around Levy’s head and stabbed him in the stomach.

Levy fled the scene and was taken in by a neighbor who called the police. The attacker did not attempt to escape the police, but his lawyers attempted to have him declared mentally incompetent. He was eventually jailed but came up for parole several times. It was later discovered that the attacker had been jailed before the attack but released due to a lack of space in the detainment facilities.

Levy died suddenly late last month while on a flight from Israel back to his home in France.

In an interview with The Algemeiner this week, Sterna Moyal, one of Levy’s 12 children, said she believed the cause of her father’s sudden death was “the shock” of the attack four years ago.

“I asked my doctor,” she recounted. “He said that in their opinion this kind of sickness can come from a shock. So they think it’s connected to the trauma that he had.”

“Nobody can tell, you know,” she said. “I’m not a doctor, but I believe that. You cannot say this is because of this, but for me it’s related.”

Her father, Moyal stated, never recovered mentally or physically from the assault.

“In his life everything was so perfect and he always worked so hard,” she explained. “His whole life was to work hard and he never took vacations. He was never the type of guy to be always tired and sick, and I never think in his life he was sick. He was a very strong person.”

“And I feel like when you see a person from one day to the next falling down like this, you can’t say that it comes from nothing,” she asserted. “This is my opinion. I feel that everything starts from this.”

In particular, Moyal said, the energy required to fight the case all over again every time the attacker came up for parole harmed her father mentally and physically.

“My father had to go a few times to the court to fight against the fact that [the attacker’s] lawyer wanted to get him out,” she recalled. “My father was very, very afraid that one day he would get out. And there was a lot of sadness and stress about that, because he was telling me always, ‘Maybe he’ll get out and start again to do what he wanted to do [to me].’ It’s crazy that they were thinking about freeing him.”

Toward the end of his life, Moyal said, Levy was desperate to leave France and move to Israel.

“He wanted to leave,” she said. “He said, ‘I don’t want to stay any longer.’ But then it was difficult because when a person is already sick they need to have a doctor who will take care of him and is already involved in the process of medical treatment. He was afraid to go to a new country.”

“But I would say that he really, really wanted to,” she continued. “He wanted really so badly and then when he was there the last week of his life he didn’t want to leave. He kept saying, ‘Please don’t make me go back to France, I just want to stay here.’”

Moyal expressed great sadness that Levy was unable to realize his last dream before he died.

The French authorities, she added, appeared to be aware that an injustice was done to her father, particularly after a demonstration on the issue in Paris.

“They sent someone to the funeral to present condolences,” she said. “They came to Israel for the funeral.”

Asked whether she felt French Jews were living in fear as a result of the attack on her father and antisemitic violence in general, Moyal replied, “No, I don’t think they are afraid. They just think that you have to continue. The opposite, you have to show that you are not afraid, and they will not win. I think a lot of people think like this.”