Little Moshe, unborn sibling held hope for the parents

Unlike the over 175 other victims of November 26, there was no folly of fate involved in the handpicking of Israeli national Rabbi Gabriel Holtzberg and his wife Rivka, who are quickly turning into the global face of India’s most brutal Terror attack yet. And, while nobody will ever know for certain just how much information the terrorists had on the hostages especially selected for them at the Chabad House in South Mumbai’s most popular tourist district, tragedy had stalked the Holtzbergs.
Little Moshe, now back in Israel, will some day confront the gruesome tale of his orphaning but his older brother Dov will never know. Dov, 4-5 years old, suffers from Tay-Sachs disease, among the most common genetic disorders affecting Jewish babies. A terminal condition, the disease is degenerative and debilitating, with patients losing all motor skills as well as hearing and sight by the time they attain the age of five or six.

Sources close to the family said Dov is in palliative care in Israel. He is in the same facility where the Holtzbergs’ first-born, Mendy, died a couple of years ago of the same disease.

“It is a double tragedy for them,” says Dr Isaac Balbin, a Melbourne-based friend of the Rabbi and frequent visitor to Mumbai’s Chabad House. “For Moshe is free from the genetic disorder, as was the baby Rivka was bearing.” Balbin says Dov couldn’t recognize his father when the latter was in Israel last. “The child was on oxygen but this young couple chose to continue their mission in India, such was their commitment to their cause.”
Mumbai’s Jews agree that the selection of Nariman House was perfectly calculated — not only were the Rabbi and his wife Israeli Jews, but their influence among Indian Jews was on the rise. Gabriel was assisting the nascent Chabad house in Bangalore and was in touch with those running similar services in Manali and Goa.

Jews across India were writing to the Rabbi, in touch with him on various topics of religion and education. At the Kenneth Eliyahoo Synagogue in Fort, worshippers recollect that the quorum for prayers would often be completed as soon as the rabbi walked in with his wife and troupe of backpackers. Rabbi Gabriel was also a sort of guide for Israeli tourists on the heritage of Indian Jews, the Bene Israelis.

Balbin, who scouts for deserving Indian and Asian students who may need scholarships to study information technology at the RMIT College, Melbourne, where he is a professor, found out about the Colaba Chabad House five years ago. “It used to be almost impossible to get kosher food in Mumbai and elsewhere in India, and I used to pretty much carry food for 10 or 12 days while I lived at the Taj. That changed about five years ago when I heard of the Chabad centre and dropped in one day, unannounced.”

The centre was then being run out of the top floor of a ramshackle hotel in Colaba, not far from the Taj. Two years ago, a Ukrainian Jew bought out Nariman House, a Parsi-owned bungalow redeveloped into a six-storey building five years ago, as a donation to the institution. The new building was a transformation: Even if the narrow building was tucked away in a back lane in Colaba amid crumbling chawl buildings, from its terrace one has an uninterrupted view of the Gateway of India seafront on one side and, on the other, of the Cuffe Parade seafront where the terrorists are believed to have landed.

“Israeli tourists and Jews could walk in at any time for a meal, pay nothing and spend the night too. It was a place to sing together, observe holy days and interact,” says Balbin. “The Rabbi had grown into a young man of tremendous influence. He was almost the de facto chief rabbi of India,” Balbin says, recollecting how friendly Indians with “not a smell of anti-Semitism” would merely be curious about the Rabbi’s black coat and hat on a boiling hot Sabbath, but asked no questions, simply assuming he was “a Guru Maharaj ji of Jews”.

The new Chabad House had big plans: A meeting space for visitors, a dining space, an even larger library of religious books and Jewish texts, an Internet room to be used for free and rooms for visitors and staffers.

When Balbin was in Mumbai three weeks ago, he spent some time speaking to Rivka and showing her pictures of his own children. “She should be a bride,” Rivka said when she saw his oldest daughter’s photograph. A day after his daughter got engaged to be married, Balbin says, “She blessed me.”

Mourners pay tribute to Groner

More than 1,500 mourners paid tribute to Australia’s most senior Orthodox rabbi.

Wednesday's memorial service for Rabbi Yitzchok Dovid Groner, the chief rabbi of Melbourne’s Chabad-Lubavitch community, took place outside the Yeshivah Centre that he built as his Lubavitch headquarters. The ceremony was streamed live on the Internet, allowing thousands around the world to watch it.

Groner died Monday after a long illness.

Police closed the main street outside the Yeshivah Centre to enable the mass of mourners to follow the coffin as it departed for the airport. His body was flown to Israel for burial Friday on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem alongside his parents.

Hundreds of messages from places such as Tasmania, New Zealand, South Africa, Israel, America and England already have been posted on the Yeshivah Centre’s Web site.

“Australian Jewry has lost one of its noblest personalities,” wrote Isi Leibler, a former president of the Australian Jewish community, who now lives in Jerusalem.

Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, a rabbinical student in Australia in the 1980s, wrote: “It’s safe to say that there will never be another like Rabbi Groner. It’s also safe to say that if world Jewry could produce another hundred like him, we would instantly solve the global problem of Jewish assimilation. But that’s the problem with great men. They are so rare that they are not always appreciated during their lifetime, but are sorely missed once their fiery hearts are no longer present to illuminate our lives.”

Australia's Chabad rabbi dies

Australia’s most senior Orthodox rabbi has died.

Rabbi Yitzchok Dovid Groner, the chief rabbi of Melbourne’s Chabad-Lubavitch community, died Monday following a long illness. He was 83.

The brother of Leib Groner, a personal secretary to the former Lubavitcher rebbe, he will be buried in Jerusalem -- alongside his parents -- later this week. A memorial service is currently being planned in Melbourne with Chabad officials scrambling to find a venue large enough for the thousands expected to mourn the spiritual giant described as the person who “put Chabad on the map in Australia.”

Michael Danby, a Jewish member of the Australian government and Groner’s local lawmaker, said: “No spiritual leader of the Australian Jewish community has had a bigger effect on the postwar generation, both in terms of the restoration of spiritual life and educational institutions.”

Over the last half-century, Groner built an Orthodox community of thousands of Lubavitchers and a network of institutions in Melbourne: two schools -- Yeshivah College and Beth Rivkah Ladies' College -- educating more than 1,500 pupils; a men’s kollel; a women’s seminary; several mikvehs; and a cluster of Chabad houses throughout the city, three of which are run by the rabbi’s sons or sons-in-law.

Born in Brownsville, N.Y., in 1925, Groner was first sent to Australia and New Zealand by the Lubavitcher rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, in 1947. He returned in 1953 before the rebbe requested he become his emissary to Australia in 1958.

Wheelchair-bound in the twilight of his life, the rabbi was renowned for his booming sermons. His flock would line up outside his door to ask religious question of their spiritual leader.

Groner is survived by his wife, Devorah, his brother Leib, his eight children and dozens of grandchildren and great-grandchildren.