Rabbi Joshua Kahn

Jews who advocate for gender equality are putting a woman-of-God at risk; creating an army of women to protect what they call their "shradim" should they fail to act.

Nitzan Shah, 37, from southern Israel was with her husband on the train to Emek Refaim last week when her right hand, first off the train, started to turn into a gun.

It looked like a suicide vest but she had lost time while digging into a bag. Now the gun was on the train, she said she could not escape.

Suddenly she heard the train going, so she stopped. When the doors closed, she said she heard a loud whooshing sound.

She thought it was the train on her left, so she walked on toward the opposite direction, without thinking any more. But as soon as she got to a window the train moved away.

'I never thought about myself'

Her husband was talking to her sister-in-law about the attack and they both said it looked like a suicide attempt. Instead of seeing her as a threat, they told her to simply identify who was in front of her.

She asked who was causing the sound and that of her husband then she went and sat down in the aisle.

“I thought it was a strange train and that they were trying to kill me but I never thought of myself as such”, Nitzan, now 37, told Haaretz.

She saw that the gun was not an automatic weapon but in fact a folding pistol, and she worried whether she would become a victim.

“If I told them I was a male it would be hard for them to take me to the hospital or the police," she said.

She asked her friend to alert her family, but Nitzan said they didn't accept her.

"It's all crazy, it's insane," Nitzan said. "They called and I called them but no one came. Of course the truth will help me get through this, but not to such a scale. But I didn't listen very carefully because I thought, 'My hands are just now reaching.'"

She then told her parents about it.