By Haaretz Service
The father of Rifka Holtzberg, who was murdered alongside her husband Rabbi Gabriel Holtzberg during the attack on the Chabad House in Mumbai last year, said he was fortunate that his children had been sent to India as emissaries "to help the people of Israel."
Addressing a memorial ceremony at the Mount Herzl military cemetery in Jerusalem, Shmuel Rosenberg spoke of "a pain and longing that does not heal" but also of his pride for the Holtzberg couple.
"I was fortunate that my children Rivka and Gabi, were sent as emissaries of the Rebbe Lubavitch to Mumbai to help the people of Israel. To help any Jew in the Diaspora get in touch with their roots, with the people of Israel and the Land of Israel," he said.
The Holtzbergs were killed together when terrorists opened fire on the Mumbai headquarters of Chabad, but their toddler son Moshe was rescued by his Indian nanny Sandra who spirited him away from the beseiged building.
"God has given us a miracle, and has left us a piece of the family, little Moishe, who all of Israel has embraced," Rosenberg said. "Little Moishe is the son of all of the people of Israel and he symbolizes our perseverance."
Rosenberg praised Moshe's nanny Sandra, who rescued him during the attack. "Moshe was saved by a righteous gentile, Sandra, who is living with us now in our house and is a part of our family. We don't have the words to thank her, and we embrace her and have adopted her into our hearts."
The bereaved father vowed that he and his family would continue the work of his children, "in doing good deeds for others."
Nine people altogether were killed in the attack on the Chabad House in Mumbai, some dual citizens but all of them Jews.
173 people were killed in the attacks on India's financial center, and hundreds were wounded.
Showing posts with label Gavriel Holtzberg. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Gavriel Holtzberg. Show all posts
Wednesday, April 29, 2009
Sunday, April 12, 2009
God’s Work - New York Times Magazine
Little Moshe has passed through the time of danger. He is healthy and clever, and if he’s sometimes clingy, that’s fine with Rivki. Staying busy with him, with all her work, keeps difficult thoughts at bay. Such as: Why are she and Gabi here, amid the stench and chaos and otherness of Mumbai? They could have been in Brooklyn or Israel instead, with family and comforts nearby to ease their sadness.
But why think about what can’t be helped? They are here because that’s what the Rebbe inspired them to do. And look at the blessings their sacrifice has brought them, just as he said it would: Moshe, their miracle, and now another child on the way. God willing, the family will grow and bring honor to their mission.
Sixth of eleven,the middlest of middle children, Rivka Rosenberg, born in 1980, grows up in Afula, Israel, in a Lubavitcher home: a smiler, a laugher, knowing how to fit in yet managing to be heard. Everyone calls her Rivki. “Not meek,” a friend says. “Not recessive. Full of life. Always looking to connect. That’s the secret.” The friend pauses. “And that’s the problem.”
The peninsula of Mumbai juts into the Arabian Sea, a beckoning finger. It is the Western face of India: a short flight from any trouble spot you can name, yet not particularly troubled itself, except by extremes of poverty and wealth. It is where others, including filmmakers, come to make a point. They find Bollywood stars and goats in the street, luxury retail and beggars like flies, and, if they are Jewish, a Chabad House for kosher food and a sense of identity in a city where it is easy to get lost. Located almost invisibly in the last crook of the last joint of the beckoning finger, on a narrow, congested alley in a neighborhood called Colaba, the house waits for those who know about it and can find their way from their hostel or five-star hotel near the Gateway of India monument, welcoming all from the sea.
Gavriel Noach Holtzberg shows up mid-fall at Oholei Torah, a Lubavitcher yeshiva in Crown Heights. He is 9, not as well off as some of the boys, already a scholar in Yiddish and Hebrew but—having just moved from Israel with his parents and six siblings—almost completely lacking in English. Nevertheless, within a year, he has emerged at the top of his class, in not just scholarship but influence. If he can’t afford the right sneakers, plays no sports, he still commands respect from the boys; in the schoolyard they speak Yiddish with him, even after he learns to speak English with them.
His family knows from the start that something is different about Gabi. At 3, he is already punctilious in his observance of Jewish law, washing his hands the second he gets up, making sure everyone says the central prayer of Judaism, the Shema. His brothers and sisters are astounded by this, but his father, Nachman, a rabbi and ritual slaughterer, or shochet, is not. Rabbi Holtzberg’s family lived for eight generations in Safed, Israel, a center of mystical Judaism as far back as the sixteenth century. His own father “davened like he eats”—prayed naturally, as a form of sustenance. Gabi, too, has the quality of relentless piety. At 17, he walks to Teaneck, New Jersey, and back, six hours, to share a Torah thought at a synagogue there. His feet are covered with blisters.
Even earlier, he has a mission. “He told me, at maybe 10 or 11, ‘I want to sharpen the knives,’ ” says Nachman. A shochet’s knives are prized tools, requiring perfect care to prevent animals from feeling pain. “I said he was too young: He didn’t know how. He said, ‘I don’t care,’ and took a knife and sharpened it. He did a good job. But good wasn’t enough for him. It had to be ‘beautiful good.’ ”
Rebbe is the Yiddish for rabbi—in the Orthodox tradition, a learned male who receives a smicha, or certification, upon finishing his religious studies, regardless of whether he goes on to lead a congregation or live a relatively ordinary life. There are thousands of rabbis, many without portfolio. Those affiliated with Lubavitcher Judaism—so named because from 1813 until 1940 the movement was centered in the Russian town of Lubavitch—are easily met in Crown Heights, often wearing black hats and bushy beards, with their wives in wigs and their boys sporting side-locks like unwound ribbons.
But the Rebbe (or “the Grand Rebbe” or “the Lubavitcher Rebbe”) has in recent history meant only one man: Menachem Schneerson. Descended from the founders of Hasidism in the 1600s, he led the Lubavitchers from 1950 until his death, in 1994. During his tenure, he turned the movement, never a monkish sect, further outward, emphasizing practical acts of spirituality and engagement with the world, as befits a man who studied at the Sorbonne and, upon escaping from Europe, became an electrical engineer in the U.S. Navy.
Next: The couple's first date.
In particular, Schneerson expanded the Lubavitcher concept of Chabad (a Hebrew acronym for the words wisdom, understanding, and knowledge) to include outreach to all Jews anywhere. The network of Mitzvah Mobiles, roving rabbis, Chabad Houses, and married emissaries called shluchim that he fostered has, since his death, grown even bigger, so that Chabad-Lubavitch, as it is sometimes called, is now the fastest-growing—and most visible—Jewish movement in the world.
The chance to meet Schneerson as a prize for memorizing lengthy rabbinical tracts leaves some boys frozen in terror. Most shuffle quickly by the awesome personage, receiving a dollar from a stack of bills to give to charity, barely lifting their faces. But Gabi stops the line dead to ask a question, and even when the Rebbe answers (“You should have a blessing in everything you need”), he keeps talking. Is the Rebbe amused, surprised beneath his whiskers? In any case, Gabi gets what he came for: a blessing on his family.
The Rebbe speaks in Crown Heights: “Don’t convince yourself that you can live off the fat of the land and reside in these few blocks. Here you have radio and television, fresh milk every day, you can shower twice a day; there is no shortage of kosher milk and kosher bread, and you can serve God here and remain here. Listen! There is a ‘desolate land,’ which is thus far undeveloped spiritually. There are Jews there who don’t even know that they lack anything. You had the unearned privilege to be brought up with Torah and mitzvahs: ‘How lucky we are, how good is our lot.’ Be there for a day, a week, a month, a year, ten years. You won’t have nice clothes and a comfortable home? The Jews in the places you are going also manage without them. Why should you be better? Perhaps they’re better than you. If you have not used your treasures for this, it must bother you. And if you are not pained, then you are lacking in your love of God.”
Rivki Rosenberg’s yeshiva life, like that of most girls, is less about standing out as a scholar or analyzing the brilliant debates of the sages than about candles and purity and making a Jewish home. She is naturally inclined to do good: She helps girls who fall behind in their studies. But she is looking for a challenge. Every summer she can she travels, always within the context of Jewish works. When she attends a wedding—and there are many weddings—she loves to dance, as if to shake off the desire for something she can’t name. At one of these weddings, in 2001, when a cousin of hers marries one of the sons of Nachman Holtzberg, Nachman has a thought. “I see this girl, a very special girl. Maybe now Gabi”—who is in Israel to complete his rabbinical training—“will take the cousin?”
They are each other’s first date. Gabi is not as handsome as Rivki is pretty, but Chabad valorizes the nerd. The boy who in secular society would be the outcast—the most studious, least athletic, shyest around girls—is here the star. It’s he who is asked to go furthest into the world to represent Jewish values. Gabi immediately explains to Rivki the crazy kind of life he is seeking as an emissary. He says, “I want to tell you I’m a special meshuggener. What I need to do, I will do. Are you ready to do?” And she says, “I’m the same way,” as if relieved.
They marry in 2002. She is 22, he 23. In wedding pictures she is ethereal, wisplike, shining; with his sketchy fluff of reddish beard and pink cheeks, he looks boyish, surprised by his good fortune. For the first time, she dons the sheitel—the wig Hasidic women wear in public as a sign of modesty. Friends will soon notice that she always adorns it with a clip of some kind and that she is always fiddling with the clip.
To be an emissary, a man must first have his smicha and his wife. Though he must also be spiritual, that isn’t enough. “You need a certain resourcefulness,” says Yosef Kantor, head of a Chabad House in Bangkok and regional director for the area. “Your head not up in the heavens, but able to function on Earth.”
Gabi is one of the best he’s seen: a brilliant scholar and also, like his father, a shochet and (not unrelatedly) a mohel. But where to place him? Chabad outposts in Boise and Bondi Beach and the suburbs of Paris are not what Gabi is looking for. It is, in a way, a shittach, a matchmaking job. “There’s a certain element of providence,” Kantor says. “You think you can know everything about a prospective partner and hope you’ll find out pleasant things, but the opposite sometimes happens.” Nevertheless, the cleaving of shluchim to their posts, like spouses to a marriage, is taken seriously; it’s not like opening a foreign bank branch. No couple is forced to accept a posting, but once they do, they are expected to hold it for life.
Next: Why Gabi's mother doubted the world’s hospitality.
Lubavitchers do not proselytize, certainly not to Gentiles; they model a form of Jewish spirituality—through scholarship, prayer, and good deeds—that they hope will challenge other Jews to do the same. But in order to reach Jews, they must first find Jews to reach. The Chabad leadership continually studies patterns of Jewish settlement and travel for places to expand. As a result, the movement now has a presence in 72 countries, with more than 4,000 couples or families serving as shluchim worldwide.
But until recently Chabad had sent only the occasional roving rabbi to India, where about 5,000 Jews remained, mostly around Mumbai, after waves of settlement going back 2,000 years. Faith was burning out, with leaderless synagogues forced to pay poor Jews in order to corral the required minyan. Addressing these local needs was enough of a reason to consider sending shluchim. But Chabad also had its eyes on foreign Jews, who, since the Indian financial “miracle” of the nineties, were visiting in greater numbers. Some were businessmen. Some were Israelis freshly liberated from army service, on their way to nonmilitary pleasures in Goa. Others were young Americans on the first leg of spiritual journeys, often pursued by worried parents.
Rabbi Kantor and his superiors decide they have found the right couple to serve such people. They know it will be a difficult job—which, in a way, for Gabi if not for Rivki, makes it even more attractive.
Still, Frieda Holtzberg is worried. Her family escaped the Nazis in Hungary—she named Gabi for a neighbor’s child killed in the Holocaust—so she has good cause to doubt the world’s hospitality. She tells her husband to change their son’s mind. It’s the Third World: Think how uncomfortable it will be for them. Think of the children, so far away. For by now Rivki has given birth to a son, Menachem Mendel, named after the Rebbe.
But Nachman doesn’t want to intervene. “I loved the idea he could be the big guy in India,” he says. Anyway, Gabi hasn’t asked their permission.
Just before Hanukkah 2003, Gabi and Rivki arrive in Mumbai with little in tow but his knives and her wigs and Menachem Mendel, not yet 1. They set up shop in a rented room at the three-star Shelley’s Hotel on the water in the main tourist area: not an ideal situation, with no kitchen, little space, and a highly disagreeable owner. Still, they get to work, offering Torah study, officiating at bar mitzvahs and weddings, serving meals, and, because there is no kosher meat to be had—and no beef, of course; it’s India—slaughtering hundreds of chickens a week.
Life isn’t easy, and visitors, whether they come for dinner or a three-night stay, are not the same as friends. But together the Holtzbergs form a defense against the world, even as they throw themselves into it. They are each other’s lifeboats. “There is no Gabi without Rivki and no Rivki without Gabi” is how her mother puts it—and even though they behave modestly in public, as Orthodox standards require, it’s apparent to everyone who meets them that they are in love. “To say they are enamored,” Rabbi Kantor says, “would be an understatement.” Indeed, Rivki looks forward to teaching women visitors about the beauty of marital intimacy in Judaism, suggesting the zeal of one who experiences it. Like many new husbands, Gabi has a small smile playing on his face all the time, though maybe that’s also because he is finally getting to be what he always meant to be. He especially enjoys lighting a 25-foot Hanukkah menorah at the Gateway of India, where the whole world, it seems, can see it.
Rivki flies frequently to Israel. On one trip back, in 2004, she meets Chani Lifshitz in the airport. A Chabad emissary in Kathmandu, Chani, along with her husband, is famous for making the largest Seder in the world, serving 2,000 people in the heights of Nepal. In the airport, she and Rivki recognize each other as fellow shluchim “by the face,” Chani says. They become friends “like that.”
Every six months or so, they meet in Bangkok for three days of shopping. Rivki dresses “simple but classic”: T-shirts, slim skirts, cute, trendy glasses, a “big, big smile and a small, small necklace.” When you give her a compliment, “she doesn’t say no—she doesn’t fight with herself.” In between, they communicate electronically. Chani often leaves her Instant Messenger open, waiting for a ping. They discuss the decoration of their premises, share ideas for new programs and recipes. (Rivki is teaching herself to make soy milk from scratch.) They commiserate about the difficulty of their work, but not too much. Chani, with three children and another on the way, talks of their progress. Rivki doesn’t.
Chani knows why, but few others do. Menachem Mendel is dying in a hospital in Israel.
Next: The Chabad House opens in Mumbai.
Babies with Tay-Sachs, a genetic disease found among Eastern European Jews, seem normal at birth. Only after several months do symptoms appear: motor weakness, sensitivity to noise, and a telltale cherry-red spot on the retina. By 10 months, seizures have usually begun; soon after that come blindness, deafness, and brain atrophy. The disease is without exception fatal, usually by age 4.
Gabi and Rivki probably knew they were carriers, and certainly do by the time a second son, Dov Ber, is born with Tay-Sachs in 2004. He too is sent, after a while, to an Israeli hospital. This is why Rivki sometimes excuses herself from guests who wonder at the sight of an apparently childless young Lubavitcher woman: She goes to another room to cry. (“Why should I make them feel badly?”) It’s also why she flies home so often. After much painful discussion and rabbinic consultation—Rabbi Kantor says that Chabad made the decision that the Holtzbergs would not be easily replaced—they choose to stay in Mumbai and visit Israel as often as necessary. In any case, the visits are more for Rivki than the babies: Eventually, they do not seem to sense her presence even when she’s there. If she feels the same about God, she doesn’t let on.
Even after they move to a bigger space within Shelley’s Hotel, the situation is untenable. More and more people are seeking their services. Meals are difficult. Also, Shelley’s is being turned into a Planet Hollywood.
With the help of a large donation from investment banker George Rohr, Gabi is able to procure, for $1.5 million, a rundown five-story concrete office building on an alley called Hormusji Street. He has big plans for it: a kitchen, dining room, and restaurant on the first floor; a library, a synagogue, and an Internet lounge on the second; guest rooms on the third and fourth; their own apartment on the fifth. On the ground level, which has a wide blue gate but no walls, a guard will sit at a table in front of the elevator and stairs. On the roof, they will hold parties and special events on a terrace designed to catch the breeze and the view of the sea.
By the time the building is dedicated as India’s first permanent Chabad House, in 2006, Menachem Mendel has died at age 2 and Dov Ber is dying. Streams of pain wash over Rivki daily, Chani says. And—both terror and joy—she is pregnant again.
Thanks to the Chabad website and Google, there are now 20 to 30 businessmen, backpackers, and students arriving for 8 p.m. dinner each night; as many as 70 come on Shabbat. Rivki doesn’t attend to them alone: She has hired a fortyish Mumbaikar named Sandra Samuel to help clean and a young man from Assam named Zakir Hussain to help cook. Visitors who stay overnight notice that the guest rooms are outfitted with new toothbrushes, bottles of shampoo, Israeli hand soap: amenities of a nice hotel. But the Holtzbergs’ apartment is dilapidated and bare, little more than a bed and bookshelf. Paint is peeling from the walls. Only the empty blue child’s room is decorated, with the aleph-bet, pictures of ducks, and a portrait of the Rebbe.
To a Chabad crew filming them, Rivki hoarsely says of the work, “It’s fun.” Certainly it is for Gabi, who is ambitious for his faith and, like ambitious men everywhere, seeks success where it will stand out best. Besides running the Chabad, he is serving all of Mumbai’s synagogues and supervising kashruth for the region. He is “impressed by his own genius,” one guest observes. He leads each new roomful of Jews in loud renditions of all the old songs, even though he can’t carry a tune. “Adon Olam,” again? another guest thinks. When his sermons go on, or when people do not pay adequate attention to a video of the Rebbe he sometimes shows, he is peremptory. “If the girls don’t want to watch this, they can leave the room,” he says. The boy who insisted on sharpening knives until they are “beautiful good” is not deterred by trivialities. When terrorists attack Ahmedabad, some 300 miles north, and a visitor asks if Gabi is worried, he says, “I don’t care, they can come, be my guest, I’m not leaving.”
The talk one night turns to meditation. Gabi insists there is something parallel in Judaism: It’s called self-control. “If there are two apples in a bowl, personally I would always take the bad apple,” he says. “That’s my way of submitting.”
Next: Moshe, the “miracle” child, is born.
“What are you saying?” Rivki interrupts—she is not afraid of contradicting her husband, even in public, and he seems to enjoy it. “I would never take the bad apple, that’s crazy!”
Like believers in any faith that promises a joyful reward when the Messiah comes, Hasidim have well-developed mechanisms for ignoring, or even relishing, personal discomfort in deference to a greater mission. Perhaps it is a good feature of good works that they are exhausting, but to make a home in a Mumbai alley after growing up in Israel and Brooklyn is something more: a form of self-abnegation. Your stipend covers a respectable standard of living—but you have to raise the money yourself. You will not get rich being shluchim.
The issue of submission to fate is rendered moot that November, their first in the new Chabad House, when their third son is born. They name him Moshe. Perhaps they have him tested; in any case, by the time he is 6 months old, they know he does not have Tay-Sachs. He is their “miracle” child, their malach, or angel; when someone later says that he and Rivki seem like best friends, Rivki says Yes, my only friend.
Sandra is promoted to nanny. It is not just because she is low caste and poor that she is grateful for the job. The Holtzbergs are kind, and Moshe is an adorable baby, “very precious to me.” Her own two boys are, at 16 and 23, too old for mothering, but Sandra sleeps in Moshe’s room, itself a privilege. Hussain, whom everyone calls Jackie, sleeps on a mat under the stairwell and at one point must be gently told by Rivki to take down the pictures of naked women taped to the low ceiling above him.
The day breaks hot and humid, as usual, but Rivki is looking forward to it anyway. The air-conditioner works; there are no special events. Only a few visitors are expected that evening. Two rabbis—Bentzion Chorman and Leibish Teitelbaum—are in town to supervise Kosher certification for a mushroom-packing plant. Chorman likes breaded chicken, so Rivki will prepare it for dinner. Yocheved Orpaz, from Israel, is visiting her daughter and grandchildren; Olga Daniella Bakayeva—Daniella, they call her, a volunteer from Seattle—said she’d come back after enjoying her Shabbat meal last week. (Even now her Facebook page is bragging about the best cholent she’s eaten in ages.) And Norma Schwartzblatt-Rabinowitz, from Mexico, will be here on the way to making aliyah: immigrating to Israel. Rivki will bake her an apple cake.
But Rivki’s mind drifts from immediate matters. It’s Wednesday, November 26, 2008: Moshe’s 2nd birthday is on Saturday. Could two years have passed so quickly? He is thriving and, now that Sandra is with him, can finally sleep through the night without his ema—Hebrew for “mother”—at his side. Otherwise, how could Rivki be pregnant with his little brother or sister? She is five months along, expecting in April.
Taking a quick break from dinner preparations around 7:30, Rivki e-mails her friend Chani. With the baby coming, what color should they paint the upstairs?
Four days earlier—at 8 a.m. on Saturday, November 22—ten men leave Karachi in a small boat. Soon they meet up with a larger ship, which takes them on another leg of their journey. Their leader is a 25-year-old Pakistani named Ismail Khan. Khan receives orders by satellite phone from handlers in Lashkar-e-Taiba, a Lahore-based terrorist group that seeks to establish Muslim rule throughout South Asia. In Urdu, the group’s name means Army of the Pure.
On Sunday, the men hijack an Indian fishing trawler, killing four crew members and eventually its captain. Another 550 nautical miles’ sail on the Arabian Sea brings them within sight of Mumbai. By now, it’s Wednesday afternoon. They wait for darkness. At about 8:30 p.m., they board a dinghy and head for land, leaving behind their shaving cream, laundry detergent, and a bottle of Mountain Dew. They disembark just south of the Gateway of India. Telling anyone who asks that they are students, they divide up into five teams and disperse into the night: to the central railway station, to the Taj Mahal and Oberoi hotels, to the touristy Leopold Café, and to the house on Hormusji Street.
Chani, in Kathmandu, has an idea for what color Rivki should paint. She opens her Internet Messenger and waits for the ping.
Dinner is over, but the two rabbis and Gabi are still on the second floor, probably discussing Torah, as Gabi is wont to do late into the night. It has been a quiet evening. A few visitors dropped by but left. Norma and Yocheved are already upstairs. Sandra and Jackie are in the first-floor kitchen; perhaps Rivki is with them, helping to clean up. Or perhaps Rivki is with the men. It will be hard, in retrospect, to piece this information together. But Moshe is asleep in his blue fifth-floor bedroom.
Next: Attackers arrive at the Chabad House.
At 9:30, the two men assigned to attack the Chabad House arrive at the gate with their Kalashnikovs, pistols, hand grenades, and bombs. The guard, mysteriously, is gone. A taxi, waiting to take the rabbis to the airport after dinner, speeds away as the shooting begins. It sounds to Sandra like hundreds of explosions; she and Jackie lock themselves into the pantry among the meat freezers and jars of olives and pickles. “Like cowards,” she says later. Gabi, on the phone with the Israeli consulate, says, in Hebrew, “The situation is not good,” and the line goes dead.
Sandra and Jackie spend the night in the pantry. They do not know what is happening in the rest of the house. On Thursday morning around eleven, they hear Moshe crying: Ema! Ema! Not knowing whether the gunmen are still in the building (they are), Sandra dashes upstairs, as Jackie escapes down. She finds the boy standing next to the bodies of his parents—dead or dying, she doesn’t know. She grabs him without thinking and runs as fast as she can into the street. His clothes are spattered with his parents’ blood.
By the time Indian commandos, airdropped into the building, get control of the situation, as Shabbat begins on Friday evening, Gabi, Rivki, Norma, Yocheved, Chorman, and Teitelbaum all are dead. (Daniella Bakayeva decided not to come for dinner after all but took a walk instead.) The timing of the killings, and possible torture, is unclear. According to some reports, someone was still alive as late as Friday morning to wave a prayer shawl from a window. But who was waving, and what did it mean? Was it a gunman, trying to surrender? In transcripts of intercepted phone calls, handlers back in Lahore instruct one of the terrorists to kill the hostages in order to “spoil relations” between India and Israel. “Brother, you have to fight,” they say, as if he were wavering. “This is a matter of the prestige of Islam.”
“I waited for you to connect to the Messenger,” says Chani.
Addressing a conference of 2,000 women emissaries at the New York Hilton in February, she is speaking as if it were still November and she could still talk directly to Rivki. “I waited for you to connect to the Messenger so that we could have coffee and a croissant together in front of the screen, as we’ve done for the last four years. A sort of private virtual joke. You prepare the morning pastry on a plate, with a detailed description of taste and texture. And always something different: one day apple pie, one day jelly cookies with cream. I prepare the drinks. In the summer, I would offer you fruit juices, and in the winter, I would roll tea leaves from Dodover Square and Geiyah Bazaar market. I’m waiting for you with the tea, Rivki. Waiting for your cake … But you’re not coming, Rivki, and your tea is getting cold.”
Instant messenger, Facebook, cell phones: The technology that made the Holtzbergs’ life in Mumbai less lonely also helped to explain its end. It is largely because Ismail Khan made the mistake of leaving his satellite phone in the dinghy that we know what we do about the terrorists’ movements; Khan and eight of the others were killed in the fighting. The sole survivor, Muhammad Ajmal Kasab, went on trial last month in Mumbai. His interrogation suggests that the attacks were part of a far broader scheme, some of which fizzled.
As it was, more than 170 people were killed in Mumbai. Many were tourists, enjoying a bite at the Leopold or settling in for an evening at the Oberoi. Others were locals, including doctors in a hospital that was, it seems, attacked as an afterthought.
The Holtzbergs were neither tourists nor locals. They were emissaries from one world to the other. Perhaps it’s more relevant to say they were Jews. In any case, to those who believe they died with the words of the Shema on their lips, their death is but another moment in their lives. What they endured in those last hours—did they know that Moshe escaped alive?—does not invalidate what they enjoyed of life beforehand, and suffered of it, too. Many in the community are therefore torn about discussing “the tragedy.” Some speak anyway, in thousands of posts to Chabad’s website. Others have commemorated the family by naming babies for them; Nachman Holtzberg has reports of 70 new Gabis and 60 new Rivkis—one of them Chani’s daughter, born this month. And others have contributed to the Chabad Mumbai Relief Fund, which will eventually continue the Holtzbergs’ mission.
For Chabad has made it clear that it is not retrenching. In December, the Holtzbergs’ parents flew to Mumbai to light the 25-foot Hanukkah menorah at the Gateway of India and another in front of the ruined house on Hormusji Street. Though no decision has yet been made about the building itself, teams of young rabbis have spent time in the city, teaching and officiating and offering meals at locations that are no longer Googleable. (Security measures have been upgraded at Chabad Houses worldwide.) Rabbi Kantor, in Bangkok, says he has even begun interviewing couples who, unsolicited, have sought to be the next shluchim in Mumbai.
Next: How Moshe is doing now.
Nachman Holtzberg has retrieved Gabi’s knives—the only personal items not held as evidence. Back in Brooklyn, he says he’d be proud if his other children became shluchim too. “I would be happy, absolutely.”
And his wife?
He sighs. “Not everyone can be the same.”
A few weeks after the attacks, in late December, Dov Ber dies at age 4. (It is later learned that the baby Rivki was carrying had tested negative for Tay-Sachs.) Nachman Holtzberg does not want to discuss it: “It’s not important,” he says. He means we must focus on what is ongoing, which means Moshe. Now he, too, is an emissary; the only Jew to survive, he accompanied the bodies of the six victims on an Israeli Air Force flight from Mumbai. His parents are buried next to his brothers on the Mount of Olives.
Many have noted that Moshe, like his biblical namesake, was rescued by a non-Jew; Sandra, now taking care of him at Rivki’s parents’ home in Afula, has been mentioned as a possible recipient of Israel’s “righteous Gentile” designation. That would allow her to remain with him, she hopes, at least until he is “fully normal.”
But what will that mean? For months, Moshe has been “very nervous,” Nachman Holtzberg says. “Nobody knows what he knows.” Things that remind him of India—a toy, a visitor—seem to bring it all back, and he wails. But Sandra, in a recent phone conversation, says Moshe has forgotten what Urdu he knew and has not asked for his parents in fourteen days.
“It’s a good thing,” she adds. And maybe it is. The world is a painful place to get to know.
At which point Moshe, who has been giggling in the background, grabs the phone. “Shalom?” he inquires.
But why think about what can’t be helped? They are here because that’s what the Rebbe inspired them to do. And look at the blessings their sacrifice has brought them, just as he said it would: Moshe, their miracle, and now another child on the way. God willing, the family will grow and bring honor to their mission.
Sixth of eleven,the middlest of middle children, Rivka Rosenberg, born in 1980, grows up in Afula, Israel, in a Lubavitcher home: a smiler, a laugher, knowing how to fit in yet managing to be heard. Everyone calls her Rivki. “Not meek,” a friend says. “Not recessive. Full of life. Always looking to connect. That’s the secret.” The friend pauses. “And that’s the problem.”
The peninsula of Mumbai juts into the Arabian Sea, a beckoning finger. It is the Western face of India: a short flight from any trouble spot you can name, yet not particularly troubled itself, except by extremes of poverty and wealth. It is where others, including filmmakers, come to make a point. They find Bollywood stars and goats in the street, luxury retail and beggars like flies, and, if they are Jewish, a Chabad House for kosher food and a sense of identity in a city where it is easy to get lost. Located almost invisibly in the last crook of the last joint of the beckoning finger, on a narrow, congested alley in a neighborhood called Colaba, the house waits for those who know about it and can find their way from their hostel or five-star hotel near the Gateway of India monument, welcoming all from the sea.
Gavriel Noach Holtzberg shows up mid-fall at Oholei Torah, a Lubavitcher yeshiva in Crown Heights. He is 9, not as well off as some of the boys, already a scholar in Yiddish and Hebrew but—having just moved from Israel with his parents and six siblings—almost completely lacking in English. Nevertheless, within a year, he has emerged at the top of his class, in not just scholarship but influence. If he can’t afford the right sneakers, plays no sports, he still commands respect from the boys; in the schoolyard they speak Yiddish with him, even after he learns to speak English with them.
His family knows from the start that something is different about Gabi. At 3, he is already punctilious in his observance of Jewish law, washing his hands the second he gets up, making sure everyone says the central prayer of Judaism, the Shema. His brothers and sisters are astounded by this, but his father, Nachman, a rabbi and ritual slaughterer, or shochet, is not. Rabbi Holtzberg’s family lived for eight generations in Safed, Israel, a center of mystical Judaism as far back as the sixteenth century. His own father “davened like he eats”—prayed naturally, as a form of sustenance. Gabi, too, has the quality of relentless piety. At 17, he walks to Teaneck, New Jersey, and back, six hours, to share a Torah thought at a synagogue there. His feet are covered with blisters.
Even earlier, he has a mission. “He told me, at maybe 10 or 11, ‘I want to sharpen the knives,’ ” says Nachman. A shochet’s knives are prized tools, requiring perfect care to prevent animals from feeling pain. “I said he was too young: He didn’t know how. He said, ‘I don’t care,’ and took a knife and sharpened it. He did a good job. But good wasn’t enough for him. It had to be ‘beautiful good.’ ”
Rebbe is the Yiddish for rabbi—in the Orthodox tradition, a learned male who receives a smicha, or certification, upon finishing his religious studies, regardless of whether he goes on to lead a congregation or live a relatively ordinary life. There are thousands of rabbis, many without portfolio. Those affiliated with Lubavitcher Judaism—so named because from 1813 until 1940 the movement was centered in the Russian town of Lubavitch—are easily met in Crown Heights, often wearing black hats and bushy beards, with their wives in wigs and their boys sporting side-locks like unwound ribbons.
But the Rebbe (or “the Grand Rebbe” or “the Lubavitcher Rebbe”) has in recent history meant only one man: Menachem Schneerson. Descended from the founders of Hasidism in the 1600s, he led the Lubavitchers from 1950 until his death, in 1994. During his tenure, he turned the movement, never a monkish sect, further outward, emphasizing practical acts of spirituality and engagement with the world, as befits a man who studied at the Sorbonne and, upon escaping from Europe, became an electrical engineer in the U.S. Navy.
Next: The couple's first date.
In particular, Schneerson expanded the Lubavitcher concept of Chabad (a Hebrew acronym for the words wisdom, understanding, and knowledge) to include outreach to all Jews anywhere. The network of Mitzvah Mobiles, roving rabbis, Chabad Houses, and married emissaries called shluchim that he fostered has, since his death, grown even bigger, so that Chabad-Lubavitch, as it is sometimes called, is now the fastest-growing—and most visible—Jewish movement in the world.
The chance to meet Schneerson as a prize for memorizing lengthy rabbinical tracts leaves some boys frozen in terror. Most shuffle quickly by the awesome personage, receiving a dollar from a stack of bills to give to charity, barely lifting their faces. But Gabi stops the line dead to ask a question, and even when the Rebbe answers (“You should have a blessing in everything you need”), he keeps talking. Is the Rebbe amused, surprised beneath his whiskers? In any case, Gabi gets what he came for: a blessing on his family.
The Rebbe speaks in Crown Heights: “Don’t convince yourself that you can live off the fat of the land and reside in these few blocks. Here you have radio and television, fresh milk every day, you can shower twice a day; there is no shortage of kosher milk and kosher bread, and you can serve God here and remain here. Listen! There is a ‘desolate land,’ which is thus far undeveloped spiritually. There are Jews there who don’t even know that they lack anything. You had the unearned privilege to be brought up with Torah and mitzvahs: ‘How lucky we are, how good is our lot.’ Be there for a day, a week, a month, a year, ten years. You won’t have nice clothes and a comfortable home? The Jews in the places you are going also manage without them. Why should you be better? Perhaps they’re better than you. If you have not used your treasures for this, it must bother you. And if you are not pained, then you are lacking in your love of God.”
Rivki Rosenberg’s yeshiva life, like that of most girls, is less about standing out as a scholar or analyzing the brilliant debates of the sages than about candles and purity and making a Jewish home. She is naturally inclined to do good: She helps girls who fall behind in their studies. But she is looking for a challenge. Every summer she can she travels, always within the context of Jewish works. When she attends a wedding—and there are many weddings—she loves to dance, as if to shake off the desire for something she can’t name. At one of these weddings, in 2001, when a cousin of hers marries one of the sons of Nachman Holtzberg, Nachman has a thought. “I see this girl, a very special girl. Maybe now Gabi”—who is in Israel to complete his rabbinical training—“will take the cousin?”
They are each other’s first date. Gabi is not as handsome as Rivki is pretty, but Chabad valorizes the nerd. The boy who in secular society would be the outcast—the most studious, least athletic, shyest around girls—is here the star. It’s he who is asked to go furthest into the world to represent Jewish values. Gabi immediately explains to Rivki the crazy kind of life he is seeking as an emissary. He says, “I want to tell you I’m a special meshuggener. What I need to do, I will do. Are you ready to do?” And she says, “I’m the same way,” as if relieved.
They marry in 2002. She is 22, he 23. In wedding pictures she is ethereal, wisplike, shining; with his sketchy fluff of reddish beard and pink cheeks, he looks boyish, surprised by his good fortune. For the first time, she dons the sheitel—the wig Hasidic women wear in public as a sign of modesty. Friends will soon notice that she always adorns it with a clip of some kind and that she is always fiddling with the clip.
To be an emissary, a man must first have his smicha and his wife. Though he must also be spiritual, that isn’t enough. “You need a certain resourcefulness,” says Yosef Kantor, head of a Chabad House in Bangkok and regional director for the area. “Your head not up in the heavens, but able to function on Earth.”
Gabi is one of the best he’s seen: a brilliant scholar and also, like his father, a shochet and (not unrelatedly) a mohel. But where to place him? Chabad outposts in Boise and Bondi Beach and the suburbs of Paris are not what Gabi is looking for. It is, in a way, a shittach, a matchmaking job. “There’s a certain element of providence,” Kantor says. “You think you can know everything about a prospective partner and hope you’ll find out pleasant things, but the opposite sometimes happens.” Nevertheless, the cleaving of shluchim to their posts, like spouses to a marriage, is taken seriously; it’s not like opening a foreign bank branch. No couple is forced to accept a posting, but once they do, they are expected to hold it for life.
Next: Why Gabi's mother doubted the world’s hospitality.
Lubavitchers do not proselytize, certainly not to Gentiles; they model a form of Jewish spirituality—through scholarship, prayer, and good deeds—that they hope will challenge other Jews to do the same. But in order to reach Jews, they must first find Jews to reach. The Chabad leadership continually studies patterns of Jewish settlement and travel for places to expand. As a result, the movement now has a presence in 72 countries, with more than 4,000 couples or families serving as shluchim worldwide.
But until recently Chabad had sent only the occasional roving rabbi to India, where about 5,000 Jews remained, mostly around Mumbai, after waves of settlement going back 2,000 years. Faith was burning out, with leaderless synagogues forced to pay poor Jews in order to corral the required minyan. Addressing these local needs was enough of a reason to consider sending shluchim. But Chabad also had its eyes on foreign Jews, who, since the Indian financial “miracle” of the nineties, were visiting in greater numbers. Some were businessmen. Some were Israelis freshly liberated from army service, on their way to nonmilitary pleasures in Goa. Others were young Americans on the first leg of spiritual journeys, often pursued by worried parents.
Rabbi Kantor and his superiors decide they have found the right couple to serve such people. They know it will be a difficult job—which, in a way, for Gabi if not for Rivki, makes it even more attractive.
Still, Frieda Holtzberg is worried. Her family escaped the Nazis in Hungary—she named Gabi for a neighbor’s child killed in the Holocaust—so she has good cause to doubt the world’s hospitality. She tells her husband to change their son’s mind. It’s the Third World: Think how uncomfortable it will be for them. Think of the children, so far away. For by now Rivki has given birth to a son, Menachem Mendel, named after the Rebbe.
But Nachman doesn’t want to intervene. “I loved the idea he could be the big guy in India,” he says. Anyway, Gabi hasn’t asked their permission.
Just before Hanukkah 2003, Gabi and Rivki arrive in Mumbai with little in tow but his knives and her wigs and Menachem Mendel, not yet 1. They set up shop in a rented room at the three-star Shelley’s Hotel on the water in the main tourist area: not an ideal situation, with no kitchen, little space, and a highly disagreeable owner. Still, they get to work, offering Torah study, officiating at bar mitzvahs and weddings, serving meals, and, because there is no kosher meat to be had—and no beef, of course; it’s India—slaughtering hundreds of chickens a week.
Life isn’t easy, and visitors, whether they come for dinner or a three-night stay, are not the same as friends. But together the Holtzbergs form a defense against the world, even as they throw themselves into it. They are each other’s lifeboats. “There is no Gabi without Rivki and no Rivki without Gabi” is how her mother puts it—and even though they behave modestly in public, as Orthodox standards require, it’s apparent to everyone who meets them that they are in love. “To say they are enamored,” Rabbi Kantor says, “would be an understatement.” Indeed, Rivki looks forward to teaching women visitors about the beauty of marital intimacy in Judaism, suggesting the zeal of one who experiences it. Like many new husbands, Gabi has a small smile playing on his face all the time, though maybe that’s also because he is finally getting to be what he always meant to be. He especially enjoys lighting a 25-foot Hanukkah menorah at the Gateway of India, where the whole world, it seems, can see it.
Rivki flies frequently to Israel. On one trip back, in 2004, she meets Chani Lifshitz in the airport. A Chabad emissary in Kathmandu, Chani, along with her husband, is famous for making the largest Seder in the world, serving 2,000 people in the heights of Nepal. In the airport, she and Rivki recognize each other as fellow shluchim “by the face,” Chani says. They become friends “like that.”
Every six months or so, they meet in Bangkok for three days of shopping. Rivki dresses “simple but classic”: T-shirts, slim skirts, cute, trendy glasses, a “big, big smile and a small, small necklace.” When you give her a compliment, “she doesn’t say no—she doesn’t fight with herself.” In between, they communicate electronically. Chani often leaves her Instant Messenger open, waiting for a ping. They discuss the decoration of their premises, share ideas for new programs and recipes. (Rivki is teaching herself to make soy milk from scratch.) They commiserate about the difficulty of their work, but not too much. Chani, with three children and another on the way, talks of their progress. Rivki doesn’t.
Chani knows why, but few others do. Menachem Mendel is dying in a hospital in Israel.
Next: The Chabad House opens in Mumbai.
Babies with Tay-Sachs, a genetic disease found among Eastern European Jews, seem normal at birth. Only after several months do symptoms appear: motor weakness, sensitivity to noise, and a telltale cherry-red spot on the retina. By 10 months, seizures have usually begun; soon after that come blindness, deafness, and brain atrophy. The disease is without exception fatal, usually by age 4.
Gabi and Rivki probably knew they were carriers, and certainly do by the time a second son, Dov Ber, is born with Tay-Sachs in 2004. He too is sent, after a while, to an Israeli hospital. This is why Rivki sometimes excuses herself from guests who wonder at the sight of an apparently childless young Lubavitcher woman: She goes to another room to cry. (“Why should I make them feel badly?”) It’s also why she flies home so often. After much painful discussion and rabbinic consultation—Rabbi Kantor says that Chabad made the decision that the Holtzbergs would not be easily replaced—they choose to stay in Mumbai and visit Israel as often as necessary. In any case, the visits are more for Rivki than the babies: Eventually, they do not seem to sense her presence even when she’s there. If she feels the same about God, she doesn’t let on.
Even after they move to a bigger space within Shelley’s Hotel, the situation is untenable. More and more people are seeking their services. Meals are difficult. Also, Shelley’s is being turned into a Planet Hollywood.
With the help of a large donation from investment banker George Rohr, Gabi is able to procure, for $1.5 million, a rundown five-story concrete office building on an alley called Hormusji Street. He has big plans for it: a kitchen, dining room, and restaurant on the first floor; a library, a synagogue, and an Internet lounge on the second; guest rooms on the third and fourth; their own apartment on the fifth. On the ground level, which has a wide blue gate but no walls, a guard will sit at a table in front of the elevator and stairs. On the roof, they will hold parties and special events on a terrace designed to catch the breeze and the view of the sea.
By the time the building is dedicated as India’s first permanent Chabad House, in 2006, Menachem Mendel has died at age 2 and Dov Ber is dying. Streams of pain wash over Rivki daily, Chani says. And—both terror and joy—she is pregnant again.
Thanks to the Chabad website and Google, there are now 20 to 30 businessmen, backpackers, and students arriving for 8 p.m. dinner each night; as many as 70 come on Shabbat. Rivki doesn’t attend to them alone: She has hired a fortyish Mumbaikar named Sandra Samuel to help clean and a young man from Assam named Zakir Hussain to help cook. Visitors who stay overnight notice that the guest rooms are outfitted with new toothbrushes, bottles of shampoo, Israeli hand soap: amenities of a nice hotel. But the Holtzbergs’ apartment is dilapidated and bare, little more than a bed and bookshelf. Paint is peeling from the walls. Only the empty blue child’s room is decorated, with the aleph-bet, pictures of ducks, and a portrait of the Rebbe.
To a Chabad crew filming them, Rivki hoarsely says of the work, “It’s fun.” Certainly it is for Gabi, who is ambitious for his faith and, like ambitious men everywhere, seeks success where it will stand out best. Besides running the Chabad, he is serving all of Mumbai’s synagogues and supervising kashruth for the region. He is “impressed by his own genius,” one guest observes. He leads each new roomful of Jews in loud renditions of all the old songs, even though he can’t carry a tune. “Adon Olam,” again? another guest thinks. When his sermons go on, or when people do not pay adequate attention to a video of the Rebbe he sometimes shows, he is peremptory. “If the girls don’t want to watch this, they can leave the room,” he says. The boy who insisted on sharpening knives until they are “beautiful good” is not deterred by trivialities. When terrorists attack Ahmedabad, some 300 miles north, and a visitor asks if Gabi is worried, he says, “I don’t care, they can come, be my guest, I’m not leaving.”
The talk one night turns to meditation. Gabi insists there is something parallel in Judaism: It’s called self-control. “If there are two apples in a bowl, personally I would always take the bad apple,” he says. “That’s my way of submitting.”
Next: Moshe, the “miracle” child, is born.
“What are you saying?” Rivki interrupts—she is not afraid of contradicting her husband, even in public, and he seems to enjoy it. “I would never take the bad apple, that’s crazy!”
Like believers in any faith that promises a joyful reward when the Messiah comes, Hasidim have well-developed mechanisms for ignoring, or even relishing, personal discomfort in deference to a greater mission. Perhaps it is a good feature of good works that they are exhausting, but to make a home in a Mumbai alley after growing up in Israel and Brooklyn is something more: a form of self-abnegation. Your stipend covers a respectable standard of living—but you have to raise the money yourself. You will not get rich being shluchim.
The issue of submission to fate is rendered moot that November, their first in the new Chabad House, when their third son is born. They name him Moshe. Perhaps they have him tested; in any case, by the time he is 6 months old, they know he does not have Tay-Sachs. He is their “miracle” child, their malach, or angel; when someone later says that he and Rivki seem like best friends, Rivki says Yes, my only friend.
Sandra is promoted to nanny. It is not just because she is low caste and poor that she is grateful for the job. The Holtzbergs are kind, and Moshe is an adorable baby, “very precious to me.” Her own two boys are, at 16 and 23, too old for mothering, but Sandra sleeps in Moshe’s room, itself a privilege. Hussain, whom everyone calls Jackie, sleeps on a mat under the stairwell and at one point must be gently told by Rivki to take down the pictures of naked women taped to the low ceiling above him.
The day breaks hot and humid, as usual, but Rivki is looking forward to it anyway. The air-conditioner works; there are no special events. Only a few visitors are expected that evening. Two rabbis—Bentzion Chorman and Leibish Teitelbaum—are in town to supervise Kosher certification for a mushroom-packing plant. Chorman likes breaded chicken, so Rivki will prepare it for dinner. Yocheved Orpaz, from Israel, is visiting her daughter and grandchildren; Olga Daniella Bakayeva—Daniella, they call her, a volunteer from Seattle—said she’d come back after enjoying her Shabbat meal last week. (Even now her Facebook page is bragging about the best cholent she’s eaten in ages.) And Norma Schwartzblatt-Rabinowitz, from Mexico, will be here on the way to making aliyah: immigrating to Israel. Rivki will bake her an apple cake.
But Rivki’s mind drifts from immediate matters. It’s Wednesday, November 26, 2008: Moshe’s 2nd birthday is on Saturday. Could two years have passed so quickly? He is thriving and, now that Sandra is with him, can finally sleep through the night without his ema—Hebrew for “mother”—at his side. Otherwise, how could Rivki be pregnant with his little brother or sister? She is five months along, expecting in April.
Taking a quick break from dinner preparations around 7:30, Rivki e-mails her friend Chani. With the baby coming, what color should they paint the upstairs?
Four days earlier—at 8 a.m. on Saturday, November 22—ten men leave Karachi in a small boat. Soon they meet up with a larger ship, which takes them on another leg of their journey. Their leader is a 25-year-old Pakistani named Ismail Khan. Khan receives orders by satellite phone from handlers in Lashkar-e-Taiba, a Lahore-based terrorist group that seeks to establish Muslim rule throughout South Asia. In Urdu, the group’s name means Army of the Pure.
On Sunday, the men hijack an Indian fishing trawler, killing four crew members and eventually its captain. Another 550 nautical miles’ sail on the Arabian Sea brings them within sight of Mumbai. By now, it’s Wednesday afternoon. They wait for darkness. At about 8:30 p.m., they board a dinghy and head for land, leaving behind their shaving cream, laundry detergent, and a bottle of Mountain Dew. They disembark just south of the Gateway of India. Telling anyone who asks that they are students, they divide up into five teams and disperse into the night: to the central railway station, to the Taj Mahal and Oberoi hotels, to the touristy Leopold Café, and to the house on Hormusji Street.
Chani, in Kathmandu, has an idea for what color Rivki should paint. She opens her Internet Messenger and waits for the ping.
Dinner is over, but the two rabbis and Gabi are still on the second floor, probably discussing Torah, as Gabi is wont to do late into the night. It has been a quiet evening. A few visitors dropped by but left. Norma and Yocheved are already upstairs. Sandra and Jackie are in the first-floor kitchen; perhaps Rivki is with them, helping to clean up. Or perhaps Rivki is with the men. It will be hard, in retrospect, to piece this information together. But Moshe is asleep in his blue fifth-floor bedroom.
Next: Attackers arrive at the Chabad House.
At 9:30, the two men assigned to attack the Chabad House arrive at the gate with their Kalashnikovs, pistols, hand grenades, and bombs. The guard, mysteriously, is gone. A taxi, waiting to take the rabbis to the airport after dinner, speeds away as the shooting begins. It sounds to Sandra like hundreds of explosions; she and Jackie lock themselves into the pantry among the meat freezers and jars of olives and pickles. “Like cowards,” she says later. Gabi, on the phone with the Israeli consulate, says, in Hebrew, “The situation is not good,” and the line goes dead.
Sandra and Jackie spend the night in the pantry. They do not know what is happening in the rest of the house. On Thursday morning around eleven, they hear Moshe crying: Ema! Ema! Not knowing whether the gunmen are still in the building (they are), Sandra dashes upstairs, as Jackie escapes down. She finds the boy standing next to the bodies of his parents—dead or dying, she doesn’t know. She grabs him without thinking and runs as fast as she can into the street. His clothes are spattered with his parents’ blood.
By the time Indian commandos, airdropped into the building, get control of the situation, as Shabbat begins on Friday evening, Gabi, Rivki, Norma, Yocheved, Chorman, and Teitelbaum all are dead. (Daniella Bakayeva decided not to come for dinner after all but took a walk instead.) The timing of the killings, and possible torture, is unclear. According to some reports, someone was still alive as late as Friday morning to wave a prayer shawl from a window. But who was waving, and what did it mean? Was it a gunman, trying to surrender? In transcripts of intercepted phone calls, handlers back in Lahore instruct one of the terrorists to kill the hostages in order to “spoil relations” between India and Israel. “Brother, you have to fight,” they say, as if he were wavering. “This is a matter of the prestige of Islam.”
“I waited for you to connect to the Messenger,” says Chani.
Addressing a conference of 2,000 women emissaries at the New York Hilton in February, she is speaking as if it were still November and she could still talk directly to Rivki. “I waited for you to connect to the Messenger so that we could have coffee and a croissant together in front of the screen, as we’ve done for the last four years. A sort of private virtual joke. You prepare the morning pastry on a plate, with a detailed description of taste and texture. And always something different: one day apple pie, one day jelly cookies with cream. I prepare the drinks. In the summer, I would offer you fruit juices, and in the winter, I would roll tea leaves from Dodover Square and Geiyah Bazaar market. I’m waiting for you with the tea, Rivki. Waiting for your cake … But you’re not coming, Rivki, and your tea is getting cold.”
Instant messenger, Facebook, cell phones: The technology that made the Holtzbergs’ life in Mumbai less lonely also helped to explain its end. It is largely because Ismail Khan made the mistake of leaving his satellite phone in the dinghy that we know what we do about the terrorists’ movements; Khan and eight of the others were killed in the fighting. The sole survivor, Muhammad Ajmal Kasab, went on trial last month in Mumbai. His interrogation suggests that the attacks were part of a far broader scheme, some of which fizzled.
As it was, more than 170 people were killed in Mumbai. Many were tourists, enjoying a bite at the Leopold or settling in for an evening at the Oberoi. Others were locals, including doctors in a hospital that was, it seems, attacked as an afterthought.
The Holtzbergs were neither tourists nor locals. They were emissaries from one world to the other. Perhaps it’s more relevant to say they were Jews. In any case, to those who believe they died with the words of the Shema on their lips, their death is but another moment in their lives. What they endured in those last hours—did they know that Moshe escaped alive?—does not invalidate what they enjoyed of life beforehand, and suffered of it, too. Many in the community are therefore torn about discussing “the tragedy.” Some speak anyway, in thousands of posts to Chabad’s website. Others have commemorated the family by naming babies for them; Nachman Holtzberg has reports of 70 new Gabis and 60 new Rivkis—one of them Chani’s daughter, born this month. And others have contributed to the Chabad Mumbai Relief Fund, which will eventually continue the Holtzbergs’ mission.
For Chabad has made it clear that it is not retrenching. In December, the Holtzbergs’ parents flew to Mumbai to light the 25-foot Hanukkah menorah at the Gateway of India and another in front of the ruined house on Hormusji Street. Though no decision has yet been made about the building itself, teams of young rabbis have spent time in the city, teaching and officiating and offering meals at locations that are no longer Googleable. (Security measures have been upgraded at Chabad Houses worldwide.) Rabbi Kantor, in Bangkok, says he has even begun interviewing couples who, unsolicited, have sought to be the next shluchim in Mumbai.
Next: How Moshe is doing now.
Nachman Holtzberg has retrieved Gabi’s knives—the only personal items not held as evidence. Back in Brooklyn, he says he’d be proud if his other children became shluchim too. “I would be happy, absolutely.”
And his wife?
He sighs. “Not everyone can be the same.”
A few weeks after the attacks, in late December, Dov Ber dies at age 4. (It is later learned that the baby Rivki was carrying had tested negative for Tay-Sachs.) Nachman Holtzberg does not want to discuss it: “It’s not important,” he says. He means we must focus on what is ongoing, which means Moshe. Now he, too, is an emissary; the only Jew to survive, he accompanied the bodies of the six victims on an Israeli Air Force flight from Mumbai. His parents are buried next to his brothers on the Mount of Olives.
Many have noted that Moshe, like his biblical namesake, was rescued by a non-Jew; Sandra, now taking care of him at Rivki’s parents’ home in Afula, has been mentioned as a possible recipient of Israel’s “righteous Gentile” designation. That would allow her to remain with him, she hopes, at least until he is “fully normal.”
But what will that mean? For months, Moshe has been “very nervous,” Nachman Holtzberg says. “Nobody knows what he knows.” Things that remind him of India—a toy, a visitor—seem to bring it all back, and he wails. But Sandra, in a recent phone conversation, says Moshe has forgotten what Urdu he knew and has not asked for his parents in fourteen days.
“It’s a good thing,” she adds. And maybe it is. The world is a painful place to get to know.
At which point Moshe, who has been giggling in the background, grabs the phone. “Shalom?” he inquires.
Wednesday, February 25, 2009
Home video recovered from Mumbai Chabad
Along with pictures that were on the restored hard drive of the Holtzberg's computer were video clips of the Chabad House activities. Enjoy this 12 minute clip, compiled by Shturem, giving us another glimpse of the kedoshim and their peulos. Some of the footage was taken just days before they were taken from the world so brutally.
Sunday, January 25, 2009
Dozens of Gavriels and Rivkas join Chabad
Yoav Friedman
Since the death of Chabad emissaries Gavriel and Rivka Holtzberg in Mumbai terror attacks, dozens of Hasidim families decided to name their newborn babies after envoys. 'This gives us great comfort,' says Rivka Holtzberg's mother
The death of Chabad emissaries Gavriel and Rivka Holtzberg in the terror attack in Mumbai over a month ago touched the hearts of people from all sectors of Jewish society in Israel and around the world.
Many Chabad Hasidim decided to commemorate the couple by naming their newborn children after the envoys, and dozens of little Gavriel-Noachs and Rivkas have joined the Jewish movement in recent weeks, from Mexico and Guatemala to Britain and Israel.
Menachem Cohen, who edits the printed edition of Chabad's website COL, was recently approached by the Rosenberg and Holtzberg families who told him they have heard of several families who named babies after Gavriel and Rivka. They asked for the site's help in locating these families so that they could thank them personally.
The request was posted on the website, and within 24 hours dozens of responses from Chabad families worldwide had been received. Cohen decided to take the subject a step further - collect the babies' pictures and publish them online.
Rivka's mother, Yehudit Rosenberg, said that she was extremely moved when she heard of the families' decision. "Knowing that there are so many Rivkot and Gavriel-Noach out there just gives me emotional strength. It's like refreshing water to a tired soul. We know that in every new Rivka and Gabi there are sparks of our children's spirit and a continuation of them, and this gives us great comfort."
Rosenberg said that she and her husband and the Holtzbergs intend to stay in touch with the families who named their children after Rivka and Gavriel, send them a greeting card, a picture of Rivka and Gabi and a children's book on the virtue of giving.
"Of course we would have liked to see our children alive, but in the meantime the naming of the babies and the good decisions people take on themselves thanks to Gabi and Rivki give us strength," Rosenberg said. "With God's help, when the Messiah comes soon we will see our children again," she concluded.
Since the death of Chabad emissaries Gavriel and Rivka Holtzberg in Mumbai terror attacks, dozens of Hasidim families decided to name their newborn babies after envoys. 'This gives us great comfort,' says Rivka Holtzberg's mother
The death of Chabad emissaries Gavriel and Rivka Holtzberg in the terror attack in Mumbai over a month ago touched the hearts of people from all sectors of Jewish society in Israel and around the world.
Many Chabad Hasidim decided to commemorate the couple by naming their newborn children after the envoys, and dozens of little Gavriel-Noachs and Rivkas have joined the Jewish movement in recent weeks, from Mexico and Guatemala to Britain and Israel.
Menachem Cohen, who edits the printed edition of Chabad's website COL, was recently approached by the Rosenberg and Holtzberg families who told him they have heard of several families who named babies after Gavriel and Rivka. They asked for the site's help in locating these families so that they could thank them personally.
The request was posted on the website, and within 24 hours dozens of responses from Chabad families worldwide had been received. Cohen decided to take the subject a step further - collect the babies' pictures and publish them online.
Rivka's mother, Yehudit Rosenberg, said that she was extremely moved when she heard of the families' decision. "Knowing that there are so many Rivkot and Gavriel-Noach out there just gives me emotional strength. It's like refreshing water to a tired soul. We know that in every new Rivka and Gabi there are sparks of our children's spirit and a continuation of them, and this gives us great comfort."
Rosenberg said that she and her husband and the Holtzbergs intend to stay in touch with the families who named their children after Rivka and Gavriel, send them a greeting card, a picture of Rivka and Gabi and a children's book on the virtue of giving.
"Of course we would have liked to see our children alive, but in the meantime the naming of the babies and the good decisions people take on themselves thanks to Gabi and Rivki give us strength," Rosenberg said. "With God's help, when the Messiah comes soon we will see our children again," she concluded.
Tuesday, December 30, 2008
Son of slain Chabad couple dies of severe illness
The funeral of Dov Holtzberg, whose two-year-old brother Moshe survived the attack on the Chabad house, was be held at 10 am in Jerusalem.
Yael Levy
'It is hard to imagine what this family has been through recently,' grandfather says following death of Gavriel and Rivka Holtzberg's four-year-old son from long-term disease
The four-year-old son of Gavriel and Rivka Holtzberg, who were killed in the terror attack on the Chabad house in Mumbai in late November, died of a severe genetic disease overnight Tuesday.The couple's eldest son died of the same disease two years ago at the tender age of three.
"It is hard to imagine what this family has been through recently," said Rabbi Shimon Rosenberg, Rivka Holzberg's father.
Rivka's sister, Haikeh, told Ynet that "there is no one to sit Shiva (seven days of mourning) for Dov."
This Thursday will mark a month since the Holtzberg couple was laid to rest. A ceremony in which their tombstones were revealed (unveiled) was be held at 11 am at Jerusalem's Mount of Olives cemeter
Yael Levy
'It is hard to imagine what this family has been through recently,' grandfather says following death of Gavriel and Rivka Holtzberg's four-year-old son from long-term disease
The four-year-old son of Gavriel and Rivka Holtzberg, who were killed in the terror attack on the Chabad house in Mumbai in late November, died of a severe genetic disease overnight Tuesday.The couple's eldest son died of the same disease two years ago at the tender age of three.
"It is hard to imagine what this family has been through recently," said Rabbi Shimon Rosenberg, Rivka Holzberg's father.
Rivka's sister, Haikeh, told Ynet that "there is no one to sit Shiva (seven days of mourning) for Dov."
This Thursday will mark a month since the Holtzberg couple was laid to rest. A ceremony in which their tombstones were revealed (unveiled) was be held at 11 am at Jerusalem's Mount of Olives cemeter
Monday, December 29, 2008
This Chanukah, Bernard Madoff makes the menorah candles flicker
By Abraham Cooper and Yitzchok Adlerstein
Sunday, December 28th 2008, 4:00 AM
December is always tough on Jewish parents. Like their Christian counterparts preparing for Christmas, many can only shake their heads as they watch the spiritual component of the Chanukah holiday eroded by waves of crass commercialism. Religiously observant or not, Chanukah is a time that Jews work to affirm their ties to their history, their common future and each other. But the Chanukah candles glow dimmer this year with the realization that one of our own seems to have pulled off the greatest heist in history.
This year, the trust Jews have for each other, the sense of belonging to a larger family, has been violated. Bernie Madoff preyed on fellow Jews, parlaying the religious and cultural bond into a license to operate without controls or accountability. Fortunes were wiped out, charitable institutions shuttered or imperiled, with the worst suffering yet to hit our poor, as the beneficiaries of the social service agencies funded by large charities will be turned away at the door. As a result, this Chanukah our fears aren't focused on ancient hatred but on contemporary scapegoating - on bigots from the extreme right and far-left who are gleefully using the Madoff debacle to stoke increasingly toxic anti-Semitism.
Jews are hardly the only, or even the best, targets of in-group scams. As reported in The Wall Street Journal in September 2006, the Securities and Exchange Commission warned of "affinity fraud," the ability of charlatans to get people who naturally trust their own kind to open their pocketbooks and accounts. It pointed to campaigns within ethnic communities like Korean-Americans and Armenian-Americans, and religious ones, like black and Baptist churches.
But the Madoff scandal hits the Jewish community where it hurts in two ways: First we will have to deal with astronomical losses in the midst of a severe economic meltdown. Beyond that is the real sense of guilt. For a strong component of Jewish communal DNA is not only to take care of our own, but to both take pride in an individual's achievement and feel the shame when a leader violates our core values.
And to that end, we are lucky this holiday to be able to appeal to the example of generous, loving Jewish lives alongside that of the greedy, scheming Madoff.
The paths chosen by Bernie Madoff and Rabbi Gavriel and Rivkah Holtzberg, the beloved martyred directors of Chabad-Lubavitch of Mumbai, couldn't have been more different. Madoff allegedly cheated his own to enhance his own reputation and to line his pockets. The Holtzbergs gave to strangers and expected nothing in return. Both made large promises and commitments. Madoff delivered treachery; the Holtzbergs delivered support that others thought impossible. Both achieved recognition. Madoff will be reviled; the Holtzbergs remembered with awe.
Moshe Holtzberg, the orphaned child of Gavriel and Rivkah, will never again meet his parents in this world. But he will have the benefit of unending pride in what they gave him. Madoff's children, who turned him in to the authorities, will have to go to great lengths to distance themselves from him and his legacy.
For every disappointment in the value of the Jewish global family, there are many counterexamples of the good it can achieve - the airlifting of 14,000 Ethiopian Jews to Israel; her absorption of 2 million refugees from Russia; the dramatic rescue of hijacked travelers in Entebbe. For every Madoff, there are a thousand people who donated to the charities he denuded.
The challenge this Chanukah is to update the markers on the opposite paths of greed and compassion and take solace in the lesson of the holiday: Remember the good when things are bleakest. The candles we kindle will continue to shed light and bring hope beyond expectation.
Rabbi Cooper is the associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center. Rabbi Adlerstein is the center's director of interfaith affairs.
Errol Louis returns on Thursday.
Sunday, December 28th 2008, 4:00 AM
December is always tough on Jewish parents. Like their Christian counterparts preparing for Christmas, many can only shake their heads as they watch the spiritual component of the Chanukah holiday eroded by waves of crass commercialism. Religiously observant or not, Chanukah is a time that Jews work to affirm their ties to their history, their common future and each other. But the Chanukah candles glow dimmer this year with the realization that one of our own seems to have pulled off the greatest heist in history.
This year, the trust Jews have for each other, the sense of belonging to a larger family, has been violated. Bernie Madoff preyed on fellow Jews, parlaying the religious and cultural bond into a license to operate without controls or accountability. Fortunes were wiped out, charitable institutions shuttered or imperiled, with the worst suffering yet to hit our poor, as the beneficiaries of the social service agencies funded by large charities will be turned away at the door. As a result, this Chanukah our fears aren't focused on ancient hatred but on contemporary scapegoating - on bigots from the extreme right and far-left who are gleefully using the Madoff debacle to stoke increasingly toxic anti-Semitism.
Jews are hardly the only, or even the best, targets of in-group scams. As reported in The Wall Street Journal in September 2006, the Securities and Exchange Commission warned of "affinity fraud," the ability of charlatans to get people who naturally trust their own kind to open their pocketbooks and accounts. It pointed to campaigns within ethnic communities like Korean-Americans and Armenian-Americans, and religious ones, like black and Baptist churches.
But the Madoff scandal hits the Jewish community where it hurts in two ways: First we will have to deal with astronomical losses in the midst of a severe economic meltdown. Beyond that is the real sense of guilt. For a strong component of Jewish communal DNA is not only to take care of our own, but to both take pride in an individual's achievement and feel the shame when a leader violates our core values.
And to that end, we are lucky this holiday to be able to appeal to the example of generous, loving Jewish lives alongside that of the greedy, scheming Madoff.
The paths chosen by Bernie Madoff and Rabbi Gavriel and Rivkah Holtzberg, the beloved martyred directors of Chabad-Lubavitch of Mumbai, couldn't have been more different. Madoff allegedly cheated his own to enhance his own reputation and to line his pockets. The Holtzbergs gave to strangers and expected nothing in return. Both made large promises and commitments. Madoff delivered treachery; the Holtzbergs delivered support that others thought impossible. Both achieved recognition. Madoff will be reviled; the Holtzbergs remembered with awe.
Moshe Holtzberg, the orphaned child of Gavriel and Rivkah, will never again meet his parents in this world. But he will have the benefit of unending pride in what they gave him. Madoff's children, who turned him in to the authorities, will have to go to great lengths to distance themselves from him and his legacy.
For every disappointment in the value of the Jewish global family, there are many counterexamples of the good it can achieve - the airlifting of 14,000 Ethiopian Jews to Israel; her absorption of 2 million refugees from Russia; the dramatic rescue of hijacked travelers in Entebbe. For every Madoff, there are a thousand people who donated to the charities he denuded.
The challenge this Chanukah is to update the markers on the opposite paths of greed and compassion and take solace in the lesson of the holiday: Remember the good when things are bleakest. The candles we kindle will continue to shed light and bring hope beyond expectation.
Rabbi Cooper is the associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center. Rabbi Adlerstein is the center's director of interfaith affairs.
Errol Louis returns on Thursday.
Monday, December 22, 2008
Mumbai attack victims remembered on Long Island
Mumbai attack victims remembered on Long Island
BY LAURA RIVERA
December 22, 2008
Reb Nachman Holtzberg said he knows no words to express his grief at the violent death of his son.
Yet, at a West Hempstead memorial yesterday for the victims of the Mumbai terror attacks, Holtzberg found a way to urge others to continue the work of his slain son, Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg.
Among the six Jews killed in the attacks last month, Holtzberg, 29, and his wife, Rivka, 28, died in the Chabad center they had operated since 2003. Inside, officials recovered a damaged Torah. According to an Israeli news report, the scroll had a bullet hole in a Leviticus chapter, which narrates divine instructions to Aaron after his sons' death.
It is a position Holtzberg now finds himself in - and, he said, he knows what he must do.
More than 200 people packed a hall inside Young Israel of West Hempstead on Hempstead Avenue to hear Holtzberg's message in his first public appearance since his son's burial in Israel.
Following a video of the events and the groundswell of public outcry that followed, Holtzberg called on the audience to strengthen the Jewish presence in Mumbai by building a bigger Chabad center there.
"We will have a bigger building and everybody who has an interest [in Judaism] in India will have a place to stay," Holtzberg said, his voice rising.
"You don't need to fight against darkness," he said. "A little light spreads."
In a spirit of solidarity with victims and their families, Rabbi Yossi Lieberman, director of Chabad of West Hempstead, asked those gathered to attend a public menorah lighting for Hanukkah.
It is scheduled for 7 p.m. today in West Hempstead at Hall's Pond Park, at Nassau Boulevard and Hempstead Avenue.
Beyond that act, said Rabbi Tuvia Teldon, director of Chabad Lubavitch of Long Island, the faithful should commit to do good acts. "This is the power of every single one of us," said Teldon, regional director of Chabad of Long Island. "To make sure we add to the world more than just the light."
Copyright © 2008, Newsday Inc.
BY LAURA RIVERA
December 22, 2008
Reb Nachman Holtzberg said he knows no words to express his grief at the violent death of his son.
Yet, at a West Hempstead memorial yesterday for the victims of the Mumbai terror attacks, Holtzberg found a way to urge others to continue the work of his slain son, Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg.
Among the six Jews killed in the attacks last month, Holtzberg, 29, and his wife, Rivka, 28, died in the Chabad center they had operated since 2003. Inside, officials recovered a damaged Torah. According to an Israeli news report, the scroll had a bullet hole in a Leviticus chapter, which narrates divine instructions to Aaron after his sons' death.
It is a position Holtzberg now finds himself in - and, he said, he knows what he must do.
More than 200 people packed a hall inside Young Israel of West Hempstead on Hempstead Avenue to hear Holtzberg's message in his first public appearance since his son's burial in Israel.
Following a video of the events and the groundswell of public outcry that followed, Holtzberg called on the audience to strengthen the Jewish presence in Mumbai by building a bigger Chabad center there.
"We will have a bigger building and everybody who has an interest [in Judaism] in India will have a place to stay," Holtzberg said, his voice rising.
"You don't need to fight against darkness," he said. "A little light spreads."
In a spirit of solidarity with victims and their families, Rabbi Yossi Lieberman, director of Chabad of West Hempstead, asked those gathered to attend a public menorah lighting for Hanukkah.
It is scheduled for 7 p.m. today in West Hempstead at Hall's Pond Park, at Nassau Boulevard and Hempstead Avenue.
Beyond that act, said Rabbi Tuvia Teldon, director of Chabad Lubavitch of Long Island, the faithful should commit to do good acts. "This is the power of every single one of us," said Teldon, regional director of Chabad of Long Island. "To make sure we add to the world more than just the light."
Copyright © 2008, Newsday Inc.
Slain rabbi's father to lead NYC Hanukkah ceremony
NEW YORK (AP) — The father of the rabbi who was killed along with his wife in the Mumbai terror attacks will lead a Hanukkah ceremony at the Statue of Liberty.
Rabbi Nachman Holtzberg will be joined by leaders of national Jewish organizations at the menorah lighting ceremony Tuesday, the third night of Hanukkah.
Holtzberg's son, Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg, and his wife, Rivka, were among scores killed last month in a rampage by suspected Islamic militants. The couple ran a Chabad Lubavitch center in the Indian city of Mumbai.
The Tuesday ceremony is part of a nationwide "Unite the Lights" campaign to mourn the victims of the Mumbai attack while promoting acts of kindness.
Nachman Holtzberg and his wife, Frida, attended a memorial ceremony for their son and daughter-in-law on Sunday in West Hempstead. Holtzberg called on the 200 mourners to help strengthen the Jewish presence in Mumbai by building a bigger Chabad center there.
"You don't need to fight against darkness," he said. "A little light spreads."
Tuesday's menorah-lighting ceremony will take place at 5:15 p.m. at the foot of the Statue of Liberty.
Rabbi Nachman Holtzberg will be joined by leaders of national Jewish organizations at the menorah lighting ceremony Tuesday, the third night of Hanukkah.
Holtzberg's son, Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg, and his wife, Rivka, were among scores killed last month in a rampage by suspected Islamic militants. The couple ran a Chabad Lubavitch center in the Indian city of Mumbai.
The Tuesday ceremony is part of a nationwide "Unite the Lights" campaign to mourn the victims of the Mumbai attack while promoting acts of kindness.
Nachman Holtzberg and his wife, Frida, attended a memorial ceremony for their son and daughter-in-law on Sunday in West Hempstead. Holtzberg called on the 200 mourners to help strengthen the Jewish presence in Mumbai by building a bigger Chabad center there.
"You don't need to fight against darkness," he said. "A little light spreads."
Tuesday's menorah-lighting ceremony will take place at 5:15 p.m. at the foot of the Statue of Liberty.
Friday, December 12, 2008
The Mumbai I Remember
By Andrew Marantz, AlterNet
Posted on December 12, 2008
As the horrific news from Mumbai poured in -- gunfire in hotels and hospitals, murderers in acid-washed jeans -- I watched the bulletins with something more than chagrin, something closer to indignation, an emotion I was not sure I was entitled to feel.
Mumbai is not my city, after all. It is a city I have visited a few times, a city I admire from afar, but not my city. I remember how conflicted I felt when foreigners offered me their condolences after 9/11: thanks for understanding, but you don't quite understand.
Condi Rice and other diplomats are now trying to stem an international crisis. Some fear we could be back on the brink of nuclear war.
Still, I can't help how the news hit me: not as a global tragedy but as a personal affront. Maybe it is because I have traversed all those narrow blocks, wandered in those very hotels. Maybe it is because I once had dinner in the home of Rivka and Gavriel Holtzberg, the murdered Chabad couple.
Maybe it is because I still cling to my own dream of Mumbai, even after watching that dream careen into nightmare.
In the fall of 2004 I was studying in Hyderabad, in the middle of South India. Most Thursday nights, a few of us foreign students would hop an overnight train, wake up in a new South Indian city, and spend the weekend there.
Mumbai, of course, was the Holy Grail of Indian cities. Camel lights, gay clubs, the biggest mansions, the biggest slums -- if it existed anywhere in South Asia, you could find it in Mumbai, and all on the same block.
But the train ride to Mumbai was 18 hours, too far for a weekend trip. So we stayed in Hyderabad and inured ourselves to the unrelenting humidity, the open-mawed stares from strangers, the blurry lines between religious festival and public dance party.
Then Yom Kippur rolled around, and with it the annual reminder that I am Jewish, whatever that means. It does not mean that I keep kosher or know Hebrew; but it does mean that every Yom Kippur I fast and I allow myself to be dragged to temple, where I stand all day hungry and bored and overdressed. This year, it seemed, would be the first year I could not be dragged to temple even if I wanted to be.
Until my friend Amitai did some research and told us that there were, in fact, Jews in India. There were the Bene Israel, said to have emigrated to India in the second century CE. There were Sephardic émigrés from Iraq and diamond merchants from Europe. Amitai had even contacted Chabad, an ultra-Orthodox missionary group with a chapter in Mumbai, and the rabbi there had extended us an invitation to eat at his house before the fast began at sundown. All in all, there were eight synagogues in the city.
Another item on the list of things you can find only in Mumbai.
I remember that weekend in Mumbai as one long day, almost as one long breath. We put on white shirts and climbed the stairs to the Holtzbergs' apartment. I extended my hand to Rivka and she stared at it, until I remembered that Orthodox women don't touch men. The rabbi served us chicken though most of us were vegetarians. He prayed frantically -- now splashing water on his hands, now standing up and bowing toward the bookshelf -- the whole time racing against the sun. Toward the end of the meal, some barefoot Israelis wandered in to hear his sermon, tying back their dreadlocks out of respect.
We rushed to the ornate Baghdadi synagogue in the neighborhood, Keneseth Eliyahoo, a blue polygonal gem of a building, and as we slipped in just before sunset, I felt the sweet soporific lull of incomprehensible Hebrew.
After services, we wandered into the street. It was late, but the air was still warm and heavy. On the sidewalk we poked our heads inside a life-sized cardboard shrine, surrounded by floral curtains, where a teenager in a 50 Cent t-shirt sat on a knee-high stage next to a porcelain Ganesh. We passed by the majestic Taj Hotel and stopped in for some air conditioning, and I remember remarking, "It's nice to be a Westerner. I look like a sweaty mess, but the guards didn't even stop me on the way in."
At some point we went to sleep and woke up and hired a taxi to dart to some points of interest. Crawford Market. Victoria Terminus. St. Thomas Cathedral. The National Gallery of Modern Art. I followed along in a giddy daze, lightheaded from fasting. At some point we let a street barber scrape the wax out of our ears; he unsheathed his sharp metal wand and plunged it somewhere between the outside of my head and the inside of my brain.
The taxi driver thought he could take us to a Bene Israel synagogue. But when I got out and asked the rickshaw-wallahs, "Jewish temple kaha hai?" they looked nonplussed. "You know, Jews," I prompted them, "Like Christians, but older." Still nothing. Then I looked over their shoulder and saw the sign, in Marathi and Hebrew: this was the temple. It was five times as big as the last one, all decked in white bunting, and packed with Marathi men in yarmulkes. When I slipped off my shoes and walked in, I was the only white person in the building.
We broke the fast near Chowpatty Beach at Café Ideal, a chintzy place that claimed to serve "Indo-American Gastronomy," which apparently meant pakoras and grilled cheese and Kingfisher beer. I can safely say I have never been happier.
This is the Mumbai I remember. This is the Mumbai I will continue to remember. Not the glitter of Bollywood but the grit of Colaba, the air thick with smog and seafoam and the stench of fish, the street thick with bhel puri carts and black taxi cabs and barefoot kids playing cricket. A city where anything is possible, not just fortune or squalor, but anything. A city where you can make a living and worship freely; but also a city where you might see a monkey garlanded like a goddess, or a naked baby learning how to dance on top of a parked car.
When we hear, inevitably, that the terrorists are enemies of freedom, we should remember that there are many kinds of freedom. The big freedoms (political, religious) should never be ignored; it is not incidental that Jews have lived in India for centuries and this is the first time they have ever been targeted.
But there are also smaller, more personal freedoms. These are the freedoms that animate my dream of Mumbai. These are the freedoms I worry about when the terrorists strike: the freedom of a city to live and breathe, to contradict itself, to be brash and sloppy and vibrant and unpredictable.
Posted on December 12, 2008
As the horrific news from Mumbai poured in -- gunfire in hotels and hospitals, murderers in acid-washed jeans -- I watched the bulletins with something more than chagrin, something closer to indignation, an emotion I was not sure I was entitled to feel.
Mumbai is not my city, after all. It is a city I have visited a few times, a city I admire from afar, but not my city. I remember how conflicted I felt when foreigners offered me their condolences after 9/11: thanks for understanding, but you don't quite understand.
Condi Rice and other diplomats are now trying to stem an international crisis. Some fear we could be back on the brink of nuclear war.
Still, I can't help how the news hit me: not as a global tragedy but as a personal affront. Maybe it is because I have traversed all those narrow blocks, wandered in those very hotels. Maybe it is because I once had dinner in the home of Rivka and Gavriel Holtzberg, the murdered Chabad couple.
Maybe it is because I still cling to my own dream of Mumbai, even after watching that dream careen into nightmare.
In the fall of 2004 I was studying in Hyderabad, in the middle of South India. Most Thursday nights, a few of us foreign students would hop an overnight train, wake up in a new South Indian city, and spend the weekend there.
Mumbai, of course, was the Holy Grail of Indian cities. Camel lights, gay clubs, the biggest mansions, the biggest slums -- if it existed anywhere in South Asia, you could find it in Mumbai, and all on the same block.
But the train ride to Mumbai was 18 hours, too far for a weekend trip. So we stayed in Hyderabad and inured ourselves to the unrelenting humidity, the open-mawed stares from strangers, the blurry lines between religious festival and public dance party.
Then Yom Kippur rolled around, and with it the annual reminder that I am Jewish, whatever that means. It does not mean that I keep kosher or know Hebrew; but it does mean that every Yom Kippur I fast and I allow myself to be dragged to temple, where I stand all day hungry and bored and overdressed. This year, it seemed, would be the first year I could not be dragged to temple even if I wanted to be.
Until my friend Amitai did some research and told us that there were, in fact, Jews in India. There were the Bene Israel, said to have emigrated to India in the second century CE. There were Sephardic émigrés from Iraq and diamond merchants from Europe. Amitai had even contacted Chabad, an ultra-Orthodox missionary group with a chapter in Mumbai, and the rabbi there had extended us an invitation to eat at his house before the fast began at sundown. All in all, there were eight synagogues in the city.
Another item on the list of things you can find only in Mumbai.
I remember that weekend in Mumbai as one long day, almost as one long breath. We put on white shirts and climbed the stairs to the Holtzbergs' apartment. I extended my hand to Rivka and she stared at it, until I remembered that Orthodox women don't touch men. The rabbi served us chicken though most of us were vegetarians. He prayed frantically -- now splashing water on his hands, now standing up and bowing toward the bookshelf -- the whole time racing against the sun. Toward the end of the meal, some barefoot Israelis wandered in to hear his sermon, tying back their dreadlocks out of respect.
We rushed to the ornate Baghdadi synagogue in the neighborhood, Keneseth Eliyahoo, a blue polygonal gem of a building, and as we slipped in just before sunset, I felt the sweet soporific lull of incomprehensible Hebrew.
After services, we wandered into the street. It was late, but the air was still warm and heavy. On the sidewalk we poked our heads inside a life-sized cardboard shrine, surrounded by floral curtains, where a teenager in a 50 Cent t-shirt sat on a knee-high stage next to a porcelain Ganesh. We passed by the majestic Taj Hotel and stopped in for some air conditioning, and I remember remarking, "It's nice to be a Westerner. I look like a sweaty mess, but the guards didn't even stop me on the way in."
At some point we went to sleep and woke up and hired a taxi to dart to some points of interest. Crawford Market. Victoria Terminus. St. Thomas Cathedral. The National Gallery of Modern Art. I followed along in a giddy daze, lightheaded from fasting. At some point we let a street barber scrape the wax out of our ears; he unsheathed his sharp metal wand and plunged it somewhere between the outside of my head and the inside of my brain.
The taxi driver thought he could take us to a Bene Israel synagogue. But when I got out and asked the rickshaw-wallahs, "Jewish temple kaha hai?" they looked nonplussed. "You know, Jews," I prompted them, "Like Christians, but older." Still nothing. Then I looked over their shoulder and saw the sign, in Marathi and Hebrew: this was the temple. It was five times as big as the last one, all decked in white bunting, and packed with Marathi men in yarmulkes. When I slipped off my shoes and walked in, I was the only white person in the building.
We broke the fast near Chowpatty Beach at Café Ideal, a chintzy place that claimed to serve "Indo-American Gastronomy," which apparently meant pakoras and grilled cheese and Kingfisher beer. I can safely say I have never been happier.
This is the Mumbai I remember. This is the Mumbai I will continue to remember. Not the glitter of Bollywood but the grit of Colaba, the air thick with smog and seafoam and the stench of fish, the street thick with bhel puri carts and black taxi cabs and barefoot kids playing cricket. A city where anything is possible, not just fortune or squalor, but anything. A city where you can make a living and worship freely; but also a city where you might see a monkey garlanded like a goddess, or a naked baby learning how to dance on top of a parked car.
When we hear, inevitably, that the terrorists are enemies of freedom, we should remember that there are many kinds of freedom. The big freedoms (political, religious) should never be ignored; it is not incidental that Jews have lived in India for centuries and this is the first time they have ever been targeted.
But there are also smaller, more personal freedoms. These are the freedoms that animate my dream of Mumbai. These are the freedoms I worry about when the terrorists strike: the freedom of a city to live and breathe, to contradict itself, to be brash and sloppy and vibrant and unpredictable.
Tuesday, December 09, 2008
Slain Mumbai rabbi was reading terror manual
A RABBI murdered in Mumbai by Islamic militants who stormed his home was reading a manual on what to do in case of a terrorist attack, the friend who identified his body says.
A Hebrew book entitled How to Protect Yourself if Terrorists Come to Your House was found on Gavriel Holtzberg's bedside table after the siege of the Jewish prayer centre he ran, Dov Goldberg said.
"He wasn't a man interested in martial arts or fighting," Mr Goldberg, 28, said of his friend and fellow rabbi.
"If he had this book it was for one reason - he was aware of the danger," he said.
"It wasn't among the many books in his library, it was on his night table, he was reading it with his wife."
Mr Holtzberg and his wife Rivka were among six Jews killed when heavily-armed Islamist extremists stormed into the Nariman House complex in the Colaba Market area where they lived and worked.
Mr Goldberg, who had already been appointed as the next leader of the Chabad-Lubavitch orthodox prayer centre run by Mr Holtzberg, was the first to enter the building after the 48-hour seige ended.
A close friend of Mr Holtzberg - they shared accommodation while at rabbinical college in Israel - Mr Goldberg said his friend, who he refers to as "Gavy", asked him earlier this year to join him in India.
He said Mr Holtzberg's wife was five-and-a-half months pregnant and the couple had planned to return to the US for the birth of their third child.
Nariman House was one of three locations where the militants linked to Pakistan-based extremist organisation Lashkar-e-Taiba took hostages during an assault that lasted a total of 60 hours.
Officials put the death toll at 172, including nine of the ten gunmen, with around 300 injured.
A Hebrew book entitled How to Protect Yourself if Terrorists Come to Your House was found on Gavriel Holtzberg's bedside table after the siege of the Jewish prayer centre he ran, Dov Goldberg said.
"He wasn't a man interested in martial arts or fighting," Mr Goldberg, 28, said of his friend and fellow rabbi.
"If he had this book it was for one reason - he was aware of the danger," he said.
"It wasn't among the many books in his library, it was on his night table, he was reading it with his wife."
Mr Holtzberg and his wife Rivka were among six Jews killed when heavily-armed Islamist extremists stormed into the Nariman House complex in the Colaba Market area where they lived and worked.
Mr Goldberg, who had already been appointed as the next leader of the Chabad-Lubavitch orthodox prayer centre run by Mr Holtzberg, was the first to enter the building after the 48-hour seige ended.
A close friend of Mr Holtzberg - they shared accommodation while at rabbinical college in Israel - Mr Goldberg said his friend, who he refers to as "Gavy", asked him earlier this year to join him in India.
He said Mr Holtzberg's wife was five-and-a-half months pregnant and the couple had planned to return to the US for the birth of their third child.
Nariman House was one of three locations where the militants linked to Pakistan-based extremist organisation Lashkar-e-Taiba took hostages during an assault that lasted a total of 60 hours.
Officials put the death toll at 172, including nine of the ten gunmen, with around 300 injured.
Tuesday, December 02, 2008
Chicago Jews mourn Mumbai victims
For many Jewish travelers, it is a beacon of hospitality in a foreign land. But on the evening of Nov. 26 in Mumbai, the Chabad House became the scene of horrific crimes that reminded many Jews of a darker time decades ago when they were targeted and tortured just for being Jewish.
On Wednesday, the Chicago Jewish community will pay tribute to six lives lost inside the Chabad Lubavitch Center in Mumbai and remind each other of his or her responsibility to bring light into darkness and repair the world.
“In the Jewish tradition, we know the world is not perfect,” said Steve Nasatir, president of the Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Chicago. “It’s no question they were targeted here. It’s selection to a certain extent. The word selection [of the terrorists] goes back to the ‘40s and the Nazi death camps. There’s a haunting connection.”
More than 170 lives were lost in the gunfire and explosions that rocked Mumbai last week. Media reports indicate that Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg, his wife, Rivkah, and their guests Rav Aryeh Leibish Teitelbaum, Rabbi Bentzion Chroman, Yocheved Orpaz and Norma Schwartzblat-Rabinovitch were tortured and killed by the militant Islamists who seized the Chabad House and two luxury hotels.
Chabad-Lubavitch is one of the largest Hasidic movements in Orthodox Judaism, and is based in the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn, N.Y. The Hebrew letters that spell Chabad are a Hebrew acronym for Chochmah, Binah, Da’at meaning wisdom, understanding and knowledge, respectively.
With the goal of encouraging Jews to learn more about their heritage and to practice Judaism, emissaries are dispatched around the world to reach out to their own, giving Jews a place to find kosher food, pray and reconnect with their faith. Though ultra-orthodox in their own practice, Chabad Houses welcome Jews of all branches--Reform, Reconstruction, Conservative, and modern Orthodox.
There are 31 Chabad Houses in Illinois. For financial reasons, plans to build a 32nd in downtown Chicago were placed on hold earlier this year.
Rabbi Daniel Moscowitz, regional director of Lubavitch Chabad of Illinois, said the plan for a memorial service came from people who had encountered the Holtzbergs in Mumbai who he said “took care of every person like their own brother and sister.”
He hopes the memorial service demonstrates the importance of finding unity and common ground despite ideological and theological differences. He also hopes it awakens people to the reality that the attacks in Mumbai could happen in Britain, Beirut or our back yard.
“This was an event that shook the Jewish people and Chabad to its core,” he said. “This is 9/11 happening all over again.”
The memorial service is scheduled for 7:30 p.m. Wednesday at the Holiday Inn North Shore, 5300 W. Touhy Ave., Skokie.
On Wednesday, the Chicago Jewish community will pay tribute to six lives lost inside the Chabad Lubavitch Center in Mumbai and remind each other of his or her responsibility to bring light into darkness and repair the world.
“In the Jewish tradition, we know the world is not perfect,” said Steve Nasatir, president of the Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Chicago. “It’s no question they were targeted here. It’s selection to a certain extent. The word selection [of the terrorists] goes back to the ‘40s and the Nazi death camps. There’s a haunting connection.”
More than 170 lives were lost in the gunfire and explosions that rocked Mumbai last week. Media reports indicate that Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg, his wife, Rivkah, and their guests Rav Aryeh Leibish Teitelbaum, Rabbi Bentzion Chroman, Yocheved Orpaz and Norma Schwartzblat-Rabinovitch were tortured and killed by the militant Islamists who seized the Chabad House and two luxury hotels.
Chabad-Lubavitch is one of the largest Hasidic movements in Orthodox Judaism, and is based in the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn, N.Y. The Hebrew letters that spell Chabad are a Hebrew acronym for Chochmah, Binah, Da’at meaning wisdom, understanding and knowledge, respectively.
With the goal of encouraging Jews to learn more about their heritage and to practice Judaism, emissaries are dispatched around the world to reach out to their own, giving Jews a place to find kosher food, pray and reconnect with their faith. Though ultra-orthodox in their own practice, Chabad Houses welcome Jews of all branches--Reform, Reconstruction, Conservative, and modern Orthodox.
There are 31 Chabad Houses in Illinois. For financial reasons, plans to build a 32nd in downtown Chicago were placed on hold earlier this year.
Rabbi Daniel Moscowitz, regional director of Lubavitch Chabad of Illinois, said the plan for a memorial service came from people who had encountered the Holtzbergs in Mumbai who he said “took care of every person like their own brother and sister.”
He hopes the memorial service demonstrates the importance of finding unity and common ground despite ideological and theological differences. He also hopes it awakens people to the reality that the attacks in Mumbai could happen in Britain, Beirut or our back yard.
“This was an event that shook the Jewish people and Chabad to its core,” he said. “This is 9/11 happening all over again.”
The memorial service is scheduled for 7:30 p.m. Wednesday at the Holiday Inn North Shore, 5300 W. Touhy Ave., Skokie.
Monday, December 01, 2008
Chabad confirms: Rabbi and wife murdered in Mumbai
Tragically, the reports yesterday that Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg and his wife, Rivka, had been killed after the Chabad house in Mumbai was taken over by terrorists were true. Officials with the Chabad-Lubavitch headquarters in Brooklyn have confirmed their deaths:
Jewish communities around the world reacted with shock to the loss of the couple, who were killed Thursday at their Chabad House during an apparent standoff between Indian military forces and terrorists.
Their toddler son, Moshe, managed to escape with his nanny some hours before Indian commandos stormed their building, known as the Nariman House, in the popular touristy neighborhood of Colaba. The Associated Press reported that the boy was unharmed, but was wearing blood-soaked pants.
“Gabi and Rivky Holtzberg made the ultimate sacrifice,“ said Rabbi Moshe Kotlarsky, vice chairman of Merkos L’Inyonei Chinuch, the educational arm of Chabad-Lubavitch. “As emissaries to Mumbai, Gabi and Rivky gave up the comforts of the West in order to spread Jewish pride in a corner of the world that was a frequent stop for throngs of Israeli tourists. Their Chabad House was popular among the local community, as well as with visiting businesspeople.
“For five years, they ran a synagogue and Torah classes, and helped people dealing with drug addiction and poverty,“ continued the statement. “Their selfless love will live on with all the people they touched. We will continue the work they started.“
Read more of Chabad’s story about the Holtzbergs here. The India Times also has a report of what happened at the Chabad house, also known as the Nariman House. It looks like three other hostages and all of the terrorists at Nariman were killed. The terrorist attacks, which began Wednesday, have claimed at least 143 lives.
I am so saddened to have to write this note. Yesterday, we all watched in horror at the terrorist attacks on Mumbai, including the terrible attack on the Chabad House. I was sickened to hear that the terrorists took the lives of the wonderful Rabbi Gavriel and Rivka Holzberg. Gavi and Rivki were two of the kindest, most generous people I have ever met, and the world over is suffering at their loss. This past Spring, my fiancé and I volunteered for 3 months in Mumbai on behalf of the American Jewish World Service. The Chabad House, and the incessant hospitality of Rabbi Gavi and Rivki, was one place during our trip that always provided solace and comfort, a familiar meal, voices of prayer, and where Will and I could feel at home. We spent several Shabbat dinners and a Passover seder with this family, laughing and singing with fellow Israeli and American Jewish travelers, learning from Rabbi Gavi’s sermons and enjoying the delicious food that Rivki had made for weeks leading up to the holiday. They gave us kosher chickens and matzah and equipped us with recipes and tips on how to keep our apartment kosher during Passover. Not only was this an important sanctuary for Will and me, but also for thousands of Jewish visitors who frequent the city every year on vacation and for business. The Rabbi and his wife had just finished creating a beautiful building with a large dining room and several guest rooms for people to stay during chagim. With tears in my eyes, I recall on the constant courage Gavi and Rivki exemplified by living in a city so foreign and challenging with determination to provide a safe place for all whom they welcomed into their home. I cry for the pain they suffered during this day of terror, I cry for Moishe who has lost the ability to grow up with his loving parents, I cry for the many of us who mourn the tragic deaths of two special people, and I cry for those who will never have the chance to meet Gavi and Rivki. Please take a moment to do a mitzvah today to compensate for all the millions of mitzvoth that they conducted every single day. May their memories only be remembered for a blessing.
Comment by Lindsay Stricke on 11/28/08 at 2:28 pm
Thank you so much for your note, Lindsay. I’m sure it took a lot to write. The world is a sadder place because of the tragedies that took place in Mumbai, to the Holtzbergs and the hundreds of others who died or were hurt by these nutjobs.
Comment by Brad A. Greenberg on 11/28/08 at 2:41 pm
Jewish communities around the world reacted with shock to the loss of the couple, who were killed Thursday at their Chabad House during an apparent standoff between Indian military forces and terrorists.
Their toddler son, Moshe, managed to escape with his nanny some hours before Indian commandos stormed their building, known as the Nariman House, in the popular touristy neighborhood of Colaba. The Associated Press reported that the boy was unharmed, but was wearing blood-soaked pants.
“Gabi and Rivky Holtzberg made the ultimate sacrifice,“ said Rabbi Moshe Kotlarsky, vice chairman of Merkos L’Inyonei Chinuch, the educational arm of Chabad-Lubavitch. “As emissaries to Mumbai, Gabi and Rivky gave up the comforts of the West in order to spread Jewish pride in a corner of the world that was a frequent stop for throngs of Israeli tourists. Their Chabad House was popular among the local community, as well as with visiting businesspeople.
“For five years, they ran a synagogue and Torah classes, and helped people dealing with drug addiction and poverty,“ continued the statement. “Their selfless love will live on with all the people they touched. We will continue the work they started.“
Read more of Chabad’s story about the Holtzbergs here. The India Times also has a report of what happened at the Chabad house, also known as the Nariman House. It looks like three other hostages and all of the terrorists at Nariman were killed. The terrorist attacks, which began Wednesday, have claimed at least 143 lives.
I am so saddened to have to write this note. Yesterday, we all watched in horror at the terrorist attacks on Mumbai, including the terrible attack on the Chabad House. I was sickened to hear that the terrorists took the lives of the wonderful Rabbi Gavriel and Rivka Holzberg. Gavi and Rivki were two of the kindest, most generous people I have ever met, and the world over is suffering at their loss. This past Spring, my fiancé and I volunteered for 3 months in Mumbai on behalf of the American Jewish World Service. The Chabad House, and the incessant hospitality of Rabbi Gavi and Rivki, was one place during our trip that always provided solace and comfort, a familiar meal, voices of prayer, and where Will and I could feel at home. We spent several Shabbat dinners and a Passover seder with this family, laughing and singing with fellow Israeli and American Jewish travelers, learning from Rabbi Gavi’s sermons and enjoying the delicious food that Rivki had made for weeks leading up to the holiday. They gave us kosher chickens and matzah and equipped us with recipes and tips on how to keep our apartment kosher during Passover. Not only was this an important sanctuary for Will and me, but also for thousands of Jewish visitors who frequent the city every year on vacation and for business. The Rabbi and his wife had just finished creating a beautiful building with a large dining room and several guest rooms for people to stay during chagim. With tears in my eyes, I recall on the constant courage Gavi and Rivki exemplified by living in a city so foreign and challenging with determination to provide a safe place for all whom they welcomed into their home. I cry for the pain they suffered during this day of terror, I cry for Moishe who has lost the ability to grow up with his loving parents, I cry for the many of us who mourn the tragic deaths of two special people, and I cry for those who will never have the chance to meet Gavi and Rivki. Please take a moment to do a mitzvah today to compensate for all the millions of mitzvoth that they conducted every single day. May their memories only be remembered for a blessing.
Comment by Lindsay Stricke on 11/28/08 at 2:28 pm
Thank you so much for your note, Lindsay. I’m sure it took a lot to write. The world is a sadder place because of the tragedies that took place in Mumbai, to the Holtzbergs and the hundreds of others who died or were hurt by these nutjobs.
Comment by Brad A. Greenberg on 11/28/08 at 2:41 pm
Sunday, November 30, 2008
Funeral preparations for Mumbai Chabad House victims under way
NEW YORK-JERUSALEM (EJP)—The funerals of Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg and his wife Rivka, who were killed in the terrorist attack against the Chabad House in Mumbai, India, will likely not take place before Monday afternoon, the Chabad-Lubavitch website said Sunday.
Israeli embassy officials in India are preparing the necessary paperwork and awaiting clearance from New Delhi to transport the deceased to Israel for burial.
Other victims identified at the Chabad House include kosher supervisors Rabbi Leibish Teitelbaum, a US born scion of the Volover Chasidic dynasty who lived in Israel, and Bentzion Chroman, an Israeli from the town of Bat Yam, and Yocheved Orpaz, an Israeli who was in India to visit her daughter and grandchildren. A sixth victim has yet to be officially named.
Rikva Holtzberg’s parents, Rabbi Shimon and Yehudit Rosenberg of Afula, Israel, arrived in Mumbai on Friday to be with their grandson Moshe, who was rescued from the Rohr Chabad Center – also known as the Nariman House – by his Indian nanny, Sandra Samuel, who hided from the Islamist terrorists for 12 hours.
The family marked Moshe’s two-year birthday.
An Israeli air force plane, due to take off for Mumbai on Sunday afternoon to repatriate the bodies, had been delayed for a few hours, a foreign ministry
spokesman said in Jerusalem, after earlier reporting that it had left.
The plane was due to take representatives of the army, the rabbinate and foreign ministry, as well as forensic experts, but had been held up as all the necessary visas had not been obtained.
The Chabad-Lubavitch Youth Organization in Israel, relaying a request from the Rosenberg and Holtzberg families, asked the Israeli government to facilitate the nanny’s entry to the country.
The Israeli media also highlighted the case of Sandra Samuel with news websites reporting calls for her to be given leave to come to Israel indefinitely or even be declared a so-called righteous gentile for her role in saving two-year-old Moshe.
"We didn't get any application yet but that doesn't mean we won't approve it," said interior ministry spokeswoman Sabine Hadad.
"If we get the application, I am sure that we will consider all that took place."
New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg had praised the nanny's "heroic" rescue of
the son and said that "during a time of terrible sadness, her courage
reaffirms our faith in the capacity of good to triumph over evil."
Nearly 200 people are now known to have died in the attacks which ravaged the Indian commercial capital, hitting five-star hotels and other targets frequented by Westerners as well as Beit Chabad.
Israeli newspapers gave blanket coverage to the Mumbai carnage in Sunday's editions, their first since the confirmation of the Israeli dead late on Friday.
The top-selling Yediot Aharonot daily devoted over a dozen pages to the attacks, the Maariv newspaper used its first 17.
Yediot carried extensive criticism of the Indian commando operation and the length of time it had taken to overcome the militants.
"Ten terrorists, who, according to the findings of the investigation, arrived by rubber raft at the shore of Mumbai carrying machine guns, grenades and dry rations in their luggage, succeeded -- almost inconceivably -- in keeping almost 1,000 commando troops and counter-terrorism combat units occupied for three days, in several battle sites," one article said.
But the Israeli foreign ministry put out a statement to domestic media distancing itself from the criticism of the Indian security forces.
“We are convinced that the Indian forces did everything they could to prevent harm from coming to the captives and civilians during the storming of the Chabad House," Yediot's website quoted ministry spokesman Yossi Levi as saying.
Israeli embassy officials in India are preparing the necessary paperwork and awaiting clearance from New Delhi to transport the deceased to Israel for burial.
Other victims identified at the Chabad House include kosher supervisors Rabbi Leibish Teitelbaum, a US born scion of the Volover Chasidic dynasty who lived in Israel, and Bentzion Chroman, an Israeli from the town of Bat Yam, and Yocheved Orpaz, an Israeli who was in India to visit her daughter and grandchildren. A sixth victim has yet to be officially named.
Rikva Holtzberg’s parents, Rabbi Shimon and Yehudit Rosenberg of Afula, Israel, arrived in Mumbai on Friday to be with their grandson Moshe, who was rescued from the Rohr Chabad Center – also known as the Nariman House – by his Indian nanny, Sandra Samuel, who hided from the Islamist terrorists for 12 hours.
The family marked Moshe’s two-year birthday.
An Israeli air force plane, due to take off for Mumbai on Sunday afternoon to repatriate the bodies, had been delayed for a few hours, a foreign ministry
spokesman said in Jerusalem, after earlier reporting that it had left.
The plane was due to take representatives of the army, the rabbinate and foreign ministry, as well as forensic experts, but had been held up as all the necessary visas had not been obtained.
The Chabad-Lubavitch Youth Organization in Israel, relaying a request from the Rosenberg and Holtzberg families, asked the Israeli government to facilitate the nanny’s entry to the country.
The Israeli media also highlighted the case of Sandra Samuel with news websites reporting calls for her to be given leave to come to Israel indefinitely or even be declared a so-called righteous gentile for her role in saving two-year-old Moshe.
"We didn't get any application yet but that doesn't mean we won't approve it," said interior ministry spokeswoman Sabine Hadad.
"If we get the application, I am sure that we will consider all that took place."
New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg had praised the nanny's "heroic" rescue of
the son and said that "during a time of terrible sadness, her courage
reaffirms our faith in the capacity of good to triumph over evil."
Nearly 200 people are now known to have died in the attacks which ravaged the Indian commercial capital, hitting five-star hotels and other targets frequented by Westerners as well as Beit Chabad.
Israeli newspapers gave blanket coverage to the Mumbai carnage in Sunday's editions, their first since the confirmation of the Israeli dead late on Friday.
The top-selling Yediot Aharonot daily devoted over a dozen pages to the attacks, the Maariv newspaper used its first 17.
Yediot carried extensive criticism of the Indian commando operation and the length of time it had taken to overcome the militants.
"Ten terrorists, who, according to the findings of the investigation, arrived by rubber raft at the shore of Mumbai carrying machine guns, grenades and dry rations in their luggage, succeeded -- almost inconceivably -- in keeping almost 1,000 commando troops and counter-terrorism combat units occupied for three days, in several battle sites," one article said.
But the Israeli foreign ministry put out a statement to domestic media distancing itself from the criticism of the Indian security forces.
“We are convinced that the Indian forces did everything they could to prevent harm from coming to the captives and civilians during the storming of the Chabad House," Yediot's website quoted ministry spokesman Yossi Levi as saying.
Mumbai horror: Rescue workers shocked by Chabad massacre site
Ronen Medzini
11.29.08, 23:57
Israel News
Mumbai horror: Rescue workers shocked by Chabad massacre site
Victim identification forces describe terrifying scene at Mumbai Jewish center; ZAKA officials encounter bound bodies, scattered prayer books, live grenades. Rabbi's wife apparently murdered early on, body found draped in prayer shawl
Israel Police forensic teams will be heading to Mumbai Sunday on an Air Force plane in order to offer their assistance in identifying the remaining bodies in the Chabad House massacre.
Officials are saying that eight or nine people were murdered at the Jewish center. Six bodies have been identified so far – five Israelis and a Jewish Mexican national.
The names of the five Israeli victims have been cleared for publication:
* Rivka Holtzberg
* Gavriel Holtzberg
* Leibish Teitlebaum
* Bentzion Chroman
* Yocheved Orpaz
Shuki Brif, a member of the ZAKA disaster victim identification force sent to Mumbai, recounted the horrifying scenes at the site of the massacre.
"When we entered the Chabad House, we saw a home completely ruined by hand grenades. The building was completely destroyed and we saw live grenades on the floor. It was a shocking sight. Prayer books and many other objects were all over the place. It was a shocking sight even for a veteran ZAKA member."
11.29.08, 23:57
Israel News
Mumbai horror: Rescue workers shocked by Chabad massacre site
Victim identification forces describe terrifying scene at Mumbai Jewish center; ZAKA officials encounter bound bodies, scattered prayer books, live grenades. Rabbi's wife apparently murdered early on, body found draped in prayer shawl
Israel Police forensic teams will be heading to Mumbai Sunday on an Air Force plane in order to offer their assistance in identifying the remaining bodies in the Chabad House massacre.
Officials are saying that eight or nine people were murdered at the Jewish center. Six bodies have been identified so far – five Israelis and a Jewish Mexican national.
The names of the five Israeli victims have been cleared for publication:
* Rivka Holtzberg
* Gavriel Holtzberg
* Leibish Teitlebaum
* Bentzion Chroman
* Yocheved Orpaz
Shuki Brif, a member of the ZAKA disaster victim identification force sent to Mumbai, recounted the horrifying scenes at the site of the massacre.
"When we entered the Chabad House, we saw a home completely ruined by hand grenades. The building was completely destroyed and we saw live grenades on the floor. It was a shocking sight. Prayer books and many other objects were all over the place. It was a shocking sight even for a veteran ZAKA member."
Rabbi Holtzburg, Killed in Mumbai
By Athol Bloomer
St. Louis, Mo. (Catholic Online) -
As I write this here in the Hebrew Catholic Center in St Louis I am still in shock about the murder of the young Chabad Rabbi Gavriel Noach Holtzburg and his wife Rivka Holtzburg. In recent months I have been following the terrible persecution and killing of Christians in India by Hindu fundamentalists. The media hardly seems to mention what is happening. Now we see such violent Islamist terror attacks in Mumbai (or Bombay as most of us call it).
I learned on Saturday that one of the places attacked was the Nariman Chabad House in Mumbai. Then, we heard of the little two year old son of the Holtlzbergs being safe but that his trousers were soaked in blood. Then a Carmelite nun of Jewish ancestry sent me the news report of the death of the Rabbi and his wife. As a Catholic Jew I felt the pain that all Jews are feeling at this time. It may be strange but there is a sense in which Jews share in the joys and sufferings of all other Jews. As someone who has known many Chabad Jews and studied with Chabad Rabbis and been fed by them at Chabad Houses I felt it more keenly perhaps than some.
Rabbi Gavriel and Rivka Holtzberg were emissaries of the Lubavitch Chabad movement who gave up their homes and families in order to serve in far off India. They ran food programs, drug prevention programs, medical services, prison and hospital visitations and classes on Jewish learning among many other things. Now, this wonderful young couple, are dead and the world has lost two workers for the good and the light in a world growing darker.
While I didn’t know them personally I know others like them.
When I lived in Thailand I would attend the Synagogue and the Chabad House in Bangkok and I saw the dedication and commitment of the Chabad Rabbis and their families. I attend the huge Passover Seders at which everyone was welcome. They helped all in need not just religious Jews – secular Jews and non-Jews with no discrimination. Many Jewish communities around the world would have no Rabbis at all if not for the Chabad Rabbis who will go anywhere in the world to serve God and the Rebbe. For example an orthodox Jewish family I stayed with each weekend in the 1980’s assisted the Chabad in reviving the Jewish community in Tasmania that had almost died out.
They are known as the 'Black Army of the Rebbe' as they follow the teachings of the seven Rebbes of Lubavitch and especially those of their late Tzadik, Rebbe Menachem Schneersohn. A Rebbe or Tzadik is the spiritual leader of a Hasidic group who follows the way of love, joy, simplicity and mercy in worshipping God as taught by the founder of Hasidism - the Baal Shem Tov of the 17th century. The first Lubavitch Rebbe was Schneur Zalman of Liadi known as the Alter Rebbe and the author of the mystical book called “Tanya”. He took the ‘heart’ teachings of Hasidism and introduced a more intellectual approach called Chabad.
Chabad stands for Chokmah(Wisdom), Binah (Understanding) and Daat (Knowledge) which represents the Divine Face of the Divine Man in Jewish mysticism. The seventh and last Rebbe of Chabad encouraged many young people to give their lives in the service of God and Judaism by becoming emissaries (apostles) to the Jews spread throughout the world. Rabbi Holtzberg and his wife were two such young people.
I remember sitting in the 1980’s with Chabad Rabbi Finman in Melbourne Australia [who I was studying with] as he translated the Rebbe’s inspiring teachings from Yiddish into English for the whole Yeshivah. I was inspired that day as Rabbi Gavriel and Rivka were inspired by the Rebbe to give their lives to God’s service. The rebbe inspired in us a devotion to the Mashiach (Messiah). Now through the evil of others they have become Jewish martyrs and given their blood for God and the Jewish people.
I pray that their sacrifice will bring others to God and that from this tragedy will come good fruit. Let us pray for their souls and the souls of all the others lost in this terror onslaught and for their loved ones to be consoled. The Jewish custom is to say Psalms on behalf of the dead so maybe we could all say a Psalm for them too.
****
Athol is an Australian of Anglo-Jewish ancestry who became a Catholic at the age of 24 in 1987. He is involved in teaching the Jewish roots of the Catholic Faith and is a member of the Association of Hebrew Catholics
St. Louis, Mo. (Catholic Online) -
As I write this here in the Hebrew Catholic Center in St Louis I am still in shock about the murder of the young Chabad Rabbi Gavriel Noach Holtzburg and his wife Rivka Holtzburg. In recent months I have been following the terrible persecution and killing of Christians in India by Hindu fundamentalists. The media hardly seems to mention what is happening. Now we see such violent Islamist terror attacks in Mumbai (or Bombay as most of us call it).
I learned on Saturday that one of the places attacked was the Nariman Chabad House in Mumbai. Then, we heard of the little two year old son of the Holtlzbergs being safe but that his trousers were soaked in blood. Then a Carmelite nun of Jewish ancestry sent me the news report of the death of the Rabbi and his wife. As a Catholic Jew I felt the pain that all Jews are feeling at this time. It may be strange but there is a sense in which Jews share in the joys and sufferings of all other Jews. As someone who has known many Chabad Jews and studied with Chabad Rabbis and been fed by them at Chabad Houses I felt it more keenly perhaps than some.
Rabbi Gavriel and Rivka Holtzberg were emissaries of the Lubavitch Chabad movement who gave up their homes and families in order to serve in far off India. They ran food programs, drug prevention programs, medical services, prison and hospital visitations and classes on Jewish learning among many other things. Now, this wonderful young couple, are dead and the world has lost two workers for the good and the light in a world growing darker.
While I didn’t know them personally I know others like them.
When I lived in Thailand I would attend the Synagogue and the Chabad House in Bangkok and I saw the dedication and commitment of the Chabad Rabbis and their families. I attend the huge Passover Seders at which everyone was welcome. They helped all in need not just religious Jews – secular Jews and non-Jews with no discrimination. Many Jewish communities around the world would have no Rabbis at all if not for the Chabad Rabbis who will go anywhere in the world to serve God and the Rebbe. For example an orthodox Jewish family I stayed with each weekend in the 1980’s assisted the Chabad in reviving the Jewish community in Tasmania that had almost died out.
They are known as the 'Black Army of the Rebbe' as they follow the teachings of the seven Rebbes of Lubavitch and especially those of their late Tzadik, Rebbe Menachem Schneersohn. A Rebbe or Tzadik is the spiritual leader of a Hasidic group who follows the way of love, joy, simplicity and mercy in worshipping God as taught by the founder of Hasidism - the Baal Shem Tov of the 17th century. The first Lubavitch Rebbe was Schneur Zalman of Liadi known as the Alter Rebbe and the author of the mystical book called “Tanya”. He took the ‘heart’ teachings of Hasidism and introduced a more intellectual approach called Chabad.
Chabad stands for Chokmah(Wisdom), Binah (Understanding) and Daat (Knowledge) which represents the Divine Face of the Divine Man in Jewish mysticism. The seventh and last Rebbe of Chabad encouraged many young people to give their lives in the service of God and Judaism by becoming emissaries (apostles) to the Jews spread throughout the world. Rabbi Holtzberg and his wife were two such young people.
I remember sitting in the 1980’s with Chabad Rabbi Finman in Melbourne Australia [who I was studying with] as he translated the Rebbe’s inspiring teachings from Yiddish into English for the whole Yeshivah. I was inspired that day as Rabbi Gavriel and Rivka were inspired by the Rebbe to give their lives to God’s service. The rebbe inspired in us a devotion to the Mashiach (Messiah). Now through the evil of others they have become Jewish martyrs and given their blood for God and the Jewish people.
I pray that their sacrifice will bring others to God and that from this tragedy will come good fruit. Let us pray for their souls and the souls of all the others lost in this terror onslaught and for their loved ones to be consoled. The Jewish custom is to say Psalms on behalf of the dead so maybe we could all say a Psalm for them too.
****
Athol is an Australian of Anglo-Jewish ancestry who became a Catholic at the age of 24 in 1987. He is involved in teaching the Jewish roots of the Catholic Faith and is a member of the Association of Hebrew Catholics
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