Less than four months after a crazed gunman slaughtered three Jewish children and a teacher outside the Ozar Hatorah high school in Toulouse, one of its witnesses came under attack during a train ride from the southwestern French city to Lyon.

According to Chabad-Lubavitch Rabbi Yosef Matusof, director of the Gan Rashi elementary school and a family friend of the victim, 17-year-old Lior Checkroun had just finished his last day at the high school last week and was returning to his family for summer break.

“He was in the same compartment as the two Arabs who attacked him,” said Matusof, adding that the boy is the only student from Lyon who attends the school.

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Media reports indicated that the pair of men punched Checkroun repeatedly until they were stopped by other passengers and train personnel. They are now in police custody. Checkroun, whose friend, Bryan Bijaoui, was seriously injured in the shooting four months ago, was taken to the hospital.

He has since been released and is reportedly recovering at home.

“It’s a double trauma for the victim,” said Marcel Amsallem, Rhones-Alpes regional president of the CRIF, the umbrella Representative Council of French Jewish Institutions. “He witnessed the killing, his best friend was seriously injured, and then he finds himself on a train and assaulted in turn.”

Students at both schools – the children killed in the Ozar Hatorah high school were students at the nearby Gan Rashi – have continued to receive psychological services since the massacre.

“It has been very difficult,” said Matusof, adding that the second-grade end-of-school ceremony included a tribute to slain seven-year-old Miriam Monsenego, daughter of Ozar Hatorah principal Rabbi Yaakov Monsenego.

Still, the local Jewish community is rebounding after the flurry of attacks – just last month, three Jewish young men were attacked on a Sabbath afternoon in Villeurbanne – and school registration appears to be picking up.

“Families that until now never enrolled have started signing up,” said Matusof. “They want to identify with Judaism even more.”