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fixing some citations
[[Image:Hieromartyr of Jacob's Well Philoumenos.gif|right|thumb|]]
St. Philoumenos was murdered on 29 November 1979. His assailant, Asher Raby (spelled "Rabi" in some newspaper accounts), a mentally ill 37-year-old resident of [[Tel Aviv]], had intruded the monastery, threw a hand grenade inside, which caused substantial damage. Philoumenos is said by investigators to have been fleeing the explosion and fire caused by the grenade when he was pursued by Raby and hit multiple times with an axe. Investigators stated that Philoumenos appeared to have been trying to protect his face with his hands when a blow to his face or head severed the one finger on each hand. Raby escaped the scene of the crime undetected.
Raby was subsequently found to have acted alone, "without any connection to a religious or political entity."<ref name=Gurevich> David Gurevich, and Yisca Harani. “Philoumenos of Jacob's Well: The Birth of a Contemporary Ritual Murder Narrative.” Israel Studies, vol. 22, no. 2, 2017, pp. 26–54. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/israelstudies.22.2.02.</ref>
The body of the Saint was handed over to the Orthodox 6 days after his massacre, but retained its flexibility and was buried in the cemetery of Mount Zion.<ref name="NOCTOC"/> Saint Philoumenos served in the [[Holy Land]] for 46 years (1933-1979).
An investigation launched by the Israeli police initially failed to identify the killer. Raby was arrested on 17 November 1982 as he again attempted enter the Monastery at Jacob's Well illicitly by climbing over a wall; he was carrying hand grenades. Raby supplied the police with accurate details of his earlier, previously unsolved, crimes. These were the murder of Fr. Philoumenos; a March 1979 murder of a Jewish gynecologist in Tel-Aviv; the murder of the family of a woman in [[Lod, Israel]] in April 1979 who claimed to have clairvoyant powers; and an assault on a nun at the Jacob's Well holy site in April 1982.<ref name=Gurevich/> The nun was seriously wounded in the attack. Both she and the gynecologist were attacked by axe, according to prosecutors.<ref name="JPost 15 Dec 82">{{cite news|title="Charges Filed in Nablus Axe Murder Case|accessdate=18 July 2017|work=". Jerusalem Post|date=. 15 December 1982}}.</ref>
Raby, a newly religious Jew,<ref name="JPost 2 Dec 82">{{cite news|title="TA eccentric 'confesses' to 1979 murders, police say|accessdate=19 July 2017|work=". Jerusalem Post|date=. 2 December 1982}}.</ref> was described as unwashed, dressed in worn-out clothing, and audibly muttered passages of scripture in a strange manner. Psychiatric evaluations found that he was mentally incompetent to stand trial; he and committed to a mental hospital; details of his subsequent whereabouts are restricted by privacy regulations.<ref name=Gurevich/> At a court hearing after his arrest, an Israeli prosecutor told the court that Raby was convinced that the monastery was the site of the ancient [[Temple in Jerusalem|Jewish Temple]], and that he made an attempt on the life of the nun "in response to a divine command."<ref name="JPost 17 Dec 82">{{cite news|title="Psychiatric Test for Confessed Slayer|accessdate=18 July 2017|work=". The Jerusalem Post|date=. 17 December 1982}}.</ref>
[[Image:Philoumenos.jpg|left|thumb|]]
In a 2017 article in the journal [[Israel Studies]], researchers David Gurevich and Yisca Harani found that false accounts blaming the slaying on "settlers" and "Zionist extremists" persisted even after the arrest of the assailant and his confinement in a mental institution, and that there were "patterns of [[Blood libel|ritual murder]] accusation in the popular narrative." The same theme was echoed in parts of the [[Eastern Orthodox Church|Eastern Orthodox]] community and by some secular sources, including ''Blackwell's Dictionary of Eastern Christianity'', the ''Encyclopedia of the Israeli-Palestinian ConflicConflict''t, ''[[The Spectator]]'' and ''[[The Times Literary Supplement|Times Literary Supplement]],'' as well as Wikipedia.<ref name=Gurevich/><ref>{{Cite web|title = Lynne Rienner Publishers {{!}} Encyclopedia of the Israeli Palestinian Conflict|url = https://www.rienner.com/title/Encyclopedia_of_the_Israeli_Palestinian_Conflict|website = www.rienner.com|access-date = 2016-02-24|quote = ... a radical Rabbi settler and his followers came to the monastery ... the extremists came back and tortured and killed ... no one was ever arrested or tried for the crimes.}}</ref><ref>{{cite news |last1 = William Dalrymple|title = The Spectator|url = http://archive.spectator.co.uk/article/22nd-october-1994/14/if-i-forget-thee-0-jerusalem|date = 21 October 1994|page = 14|quote = a settler had poisoned his dogs, attacked him with an axe, then incinerated his remains with a grenade.}}</ref><ref>{{cite book|author1=Ken Parry |author2=David J. Melling |author3=Dimitri Brady |author4=Sidney H. Griffith |author5=John F. Healey |title = The Blackwell Dictionary of Eastern Christianity|year = 2001|isbn = 9780631232032|url = http://www.blackwellreference.com/public/tocnode?id=g9780631232032_chunk_g978063123203220_ss1-39|quote = "was murdered by Zionist extremists determined to remove Christians entirely from this sacred Jewish site"}}</ref>
Gurevich and Harani contended that a 1989 account of the murder, published in ''Orthodox America'', a publication of the [[Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia]], became the basis of an anti-Semitic [[Blood libel|ritual murder]] narrative, according to which a group of anti-Christianity Jews first harassed Philoumenos and destroyed Christian holy objects at the monastery, then murdered him.<ref name=Gurevich/>