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.
Showing posts with label Mumbai. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Mumbai. Show all posts
Sunday, April 12, 2009
Friday, March 20, 2009
The PM, Jason Kenney and a room packed with rabbis
Prime Minister Stephen Harper gave a speech to the Canadian Federation of Chabad Lubavitch to honour the memory of the Lubavitchers killed in the Mumbai Chabad House terrorist attack.
Jason Kenney, Minister of Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism, also spoke passionately about the horrific attack.
Jason Kenney, Minister of Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism, also spoke passionately about the horrific attack.
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.
Thursday, February 19, 2009
Father of slain Chabad rabbi visits Sydney
February 18, 2009
SYDNEY, Australia (JTA) -- The father of the Chabad rabbi slain in the Mumbai terror attacks is visiting Australia.
Rabbi Nachman Holtzberg, whose son Gavriel and daughter-in-law Rivka were murdered last November, was honored Tuesday night at a gala dinner with 1,500 guests hosted by Chabad-Lubavitch in Sydney.
Holtzberg thanked the Jewish community “for your great love to me and my family in those days filled with darkness and pain.” He also recognized the Australian government's assistance.
“Participation of the government in such a faraway country is special, as it means that the wider Australian community, not just the Jewish community, stands with us in the struggle of good against evil, light over darkness,” he said.
Holtzberg was joined in Sydney by Moscow Rabbi Avraham Berkowitz, who has been appointed director of the fund to rebuild the Chabad house in Mumbai and to ensure lifetime support for the couple’s 2-year-old orphaned son, Moshe. More than $3 million will be required to rebuild the Chabad house.
Malcolm Turnbull, the leader of the opposition Liberal Party, praised Chabad and paid tribute to the young couple killed in the terror attacks.
“The best way we can remember your inspirational son and daughter-in-law is to practice and promote Yiddishkeit with even more vigor,” he said.
Turnbull added that he was still “humbled” that Chabad’s chief rabbi, Pinchus Feldman, presented him in 2007 with a U.S. dollar from the Lubavitcher rebbe.
Governor General Quentic Bryce sent a letter of support, as did Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, who commended Chabad of Sydney’s assistance in the aftermath of the Victorian bush fire disaster on Feb. 7 that has killed more than 200 people.
SYDNEY, Australia (JTA) -- The father of the Chabad rabbi slain in the Mumbai terror attacks is visiting Australia.
Rabbi Nachman Holtzberg, whose son Gavriel and daughter-in-law Rivka were murdered last November, was honored Tuesday night at a gala dinner with 1,500 guests hosted by Chabad-Lubavitch in Sydney.
Holtzberg thanked the Jewish community “for your great love to me and my family in those days filled with darkness and pain.” He also recognized the Australian government's assistance.
“Participation of the government in such a faraway country is special, as it means that the wider Australian community, not just the Jewish community, stands with us in the struggle of good against evil, light over darkness,” he said.
Holtzberg was joined in Sydney by Moscow Rabbi Avraham Berkowitz, who has been appointed director of the fund to rebuild the Chabad house in Mumbai and to ensure lifetime support for the couple’s 2-year-old orphaned son, Moshe. More than $3 million will be required to rebuild the Chabad house.
Malcolm Turnbull, the leader of the opposition Liberal Party, praised Chabad and paid tribute to the young couple killed in the terror attacks.
“The best way we can remember your inspirational son and daughter-in-law is to practice and promote Yiddishkeit with even more vigor,” he said.
Turnbull added that he was still “humbled” that Chabad’s chief rabbi, Pinchus Feldman, presented him in 2007 with a U.S. dollar from the Lubavitcher rebbe.
Governor General Quentic Bryce sent a letter of support, as did Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, who commended Chabad of Sydney’s assistance in the aftermath of the Victorian bush fire disaster on Feb. 7 that has killed more than 200 people.
Missing Rivky
by Sharon Udasin
Staff Writer
As Chani Lifshitz stepped on an empty stage to address at least 2,700 of her closest sisters here last Sunday, one woman was noticeably missing from the crowd — her very best friend, Rivky Holtzberg.
Lifshitz spoke to a sea of women gathered at the 21st Annual International Conference of Chabad-Lubavitch Women Emissaries — a weeklong convention that concludes with a beautiful banquet after several days of intense learning, training and reconnecting. This was the first mass gathering of Chabad emissaries since the terror attack in Mumbai three months ago, which buried Rabbi Gavriel and Rivkah Holtzberg. Addressing the fortitude and leadership of this strong network of Chabad women, speakers led the evening’s proceedings in memory of the slain couple.
“Nothing will ever break us — or so I thought,” said Lifshitz, who is in her ninth year as an emissary to Katmandu, Nepal — just a two-hour flight from Mumbai.
“I lost the very best friend I ever had — I lost my Rivky,” she continued. “Since then I have never stopped searching for her.”
When Holtzberg and Lifshitz met in their Southeast Asian neighborhood four and half years ago, the two women formed a “neighborly connection” that soon grew into a friendship of “twin souls,” as Lifshitz describes.
“I was a relatively veteran shluchos [female emissary] in this neck of the woods,” Lifshitz said, explaining how she helped Holtzberg get adjusted and settle into her new — and very different — neighborhood. But soon, Lifshitz was just as much relying on the newcomer for comfort as Holtzberg looked to her for guidance.
In continued tears of disbelief, Lifshitz recalled how only two weeks before the attack, Gavriel Holtzberg and her own husband had foraged India together in search of a kidney for a fellow Jew. Only 12 hours before the tragedy occurred, Lifshitz said that something began to disturb her, and instinctively, she signed onto instant messenger to tell Rivky Holtzberg “I love you.” And just two hours before the attack, Holtzberg messaged that baby Moshe had finally agreed to go to bed.
Back on the podium, Lifshitz spoke directly to Holtzberg as if she were in the room among the women, rather than an image projected on a cinema-sized screen. Holtzberg’s face was sorely absent from the crowd, but Lifshitz assured the audience that her best friend was in fact there, attending the Women’s Conference with them in spirit.
Three months after tragedy befell in Mumbai, friends and family are still trying to pick up the pieces and prepare a new beginning for the crumbled community. For the time being, Gabi Holtzberg’s parents and brother are temporarily manning the rabbi and rebbetzin positions in Mumbai, but plans are in the works to bring in more permanent pair of shluchim, according to sources at Chabad.org.
Despite their loss of Holtzberg, however, Chabad women continue to chug along — saying they are using the Mumbai tragedy and the economic upheaval as a springboard for them to leap forward, to be even more productive.
“Are Gabi and Rivky now a symbol of heroism? I think that is so,” life strategist Rabbi Shea Hecht told the Jewish Week, mentioning just how many babies in the community have been named Gavriel and Rivkah since. “People are somehow identifying with them.”
“This is the time to initiate new programs,” said Rabbi Moshe Kotlarsky, who oversees the Chabad emissaries and was a speaker that evening. “This is not the time to cut back.”
Dini Freundlich, emissary to Beijing, agrees with this sentiment, yet she and her family continue to feel the aftershock of the terror, as it reverberates through Asia.
“It felt extremely close to home because we live in a very similar setting,” Freundlich said, noting that most of the Asian Chabad houses harbor backpackers, students and tourists in transit. “I can just imagine that she was doing what I was doing.”
After hearing about the tragedy and viewing the horrific images, her five children — who range from 18 months to 13 years — expressed fear that a similar attack could threaten them too.
“They asked a lot of questions, had a lot of concerns: ‘It could’ve happened to us,’ ‘Is the front door locked?’ They felt like it almost happened to them,” Freundlich said, noting that for the first 10 days or so, all five of her children slept in her bedroom.
“Suddenly they were thrown into an R-rated movie in their living room,” she added.
Freundlich and her husband are working to safeguard their own home, and they are currently receiving help from the Israel Embassy’s security force, as well as El Al Airlines security team and the local Beijing police.
“We have taken on different measures to put better security measures at the school and the Chabad house,” she said. They are improving video surveillance in both buildings, and on Friday nights, Beijing police officers will patrol the area. Freundlich herself is equipped to do anything from directing a taxi driver to handling a problematic situation — because she decided to learn the local language, Mandarin.
“You have to learn the language,” she said. “I had to go to the grocery store and shop; I had to tell a taxi driver to turn right or left.”
But at the same time, like all of the resilient women at the Women’s Conference, Freundlich pressed on with her programs, where she said she has 50 children attending her secular studies school. In the evening she guides her two oldest children through their Webcam Judaic studies class, where they learn with an instructor alongside three girls from Europe.
“They go on early — an hour before — and stay an hour after for the social opportunity,” she said.
Much closer to the tragedy in distance and in friendship, the Lifshitzes made sure to visit the devastated community for a Chanukah menorah lighting, just one month after the attack. But as they grieve, Lifshitz and her family also move forward, and they continue to serve Shabbat dinners to backpackers each week and to prepare for their huge Passover seders.
“When you are part of a unique army such as ours, you can never wallow in mud,” she told the nearly 3,000 women. “We are the path.”
Staff Writer
As Chani Lifshitz stepped on an empty stage to address at least 2,700 of her closest sisters here last Sunday, one woman was noticeably missing from the crowd — her very best friend, Rivky Holtzberg.
Lifshitz spoke to a sea of women gathered at the 21st Annual International Conference of Chabad-Lubavitch Women Emissaries — a weeklong convention that concludes with a beautiful banquet after several days of intense learning, training and reconnecting. This was the first mass gathering of Chabad emissaries since the terror attack in Mumbai three months ago, which buried Rabbi Gavriel and Rivkah Holtzberg. Addressing the fortitude and leadership of this strong network of Chabad women, speakers led the evening’s proceedings in memory of the slain couple.
“Nothing will ever break us — or so I thought,” said Lifshitz, who is in her ninth year as an emissary to Katmandu, Nepal — just a two-hour flight from Mumbai.
“I lost the very best friend I ever had — I lost my Rivky,” she continued. “Since then I have never stopped searching for her.”
When Holtzberg and Lifshitz met in their Southeast Asian neighborhood four and half years ago, the two women formed a “neighborly connection” that soon grew into a friendship of “twin souls,” as Lifshitz describes.
“I was a relatively veteran shluchos [female emissary] in this neck of the woods,” Lifshitz said, explaining how she helped Holtzberg get adjusted and settle into her new — and very different — neighborhood. But soon, Lifshitz was just as much relying on the newcomer for comfort as Holtzberg looked to her for guidance.
In continued tears of disbelief, Lifshitz recalled how only two weeks before the attack, Gavriel Holtzberg and her own husband had foraged India together in search of a kidney for a fellow Jew. Only 12 hours before the tragedy occurred, Lifshitz said that something began to disturb her, and instinctively, she signed onto instant messenger to tell Rivky Holtzberg “I love you.” And just two hours before the attack, Holtzberg messaged that baby Moshe had finally agreed to go to bed.
Back on the podium, Lifshitz spoke directly to Holtzberg as if she were in the room among the women, rather than an image projected on a cinema-sized screen. Holtzberg’s face was sorely absent from the crowd, but Lifshitz assured the audience that her best friend was in fact there, attending the Women’s Conference with them in spirit.
Three months after tragedy befell in Mumbai, friends and family are still trying to pick up the pieces and prepare a new beginning for the crumbled community. For the time being, Gabi Holtzberg’s parents and brother are temporarily manning the rabbi and rebbetzin positions in Mumbai, but plans are in the works to bring in more permanent pair of shluchim, according to sources at Chabad.org.
Despite their loss of Holtzberg, however, Chabad women continue to chug along — saying they are using the Mumbai tragedy and the economic upheaval as a springboard for them to leap forward, to be even more productive.
“Are Gabi and Rivky now a symbol of heroism? I think that is so,” life strategist Rabbi Shea Hecht told the Jewish Week, mentioning just how many babies in the community have been named Gavriel and Rivkah since. “People are somehow identifying with them.”
“This is the time to initiate new programs,” said Rabbi Moshe Kotlarsky, who oversees the Chabad emissaries and was a speaker that evening. “This is not the time to cut back.”
Dini Freundlich, emissary to Beijing, agrees with this sentiment, yet she and her family continue to feel the aftershock of the terror, as it reverberates through Asia.
“It felt extremely close to home because we live in a very similar setting,” Freundlich said, noting that most of the Asian Chabad houses harbor backpackers, students and tourists in transit. “I can just imagine that she was doing what I was doing.”
After hearing about the tragedy and viewing the horrific images, her five children — who range from 18 months to 13 years — expressed fear that a similar attack could threaten them too.
“They asked a lot of questions, had a lot of concerns: ‘It could’ve happened to us,’ ‘Is the front door locked?’ They felt like it almost happened to them,” Freundlich said, noting that for the first 10 days or so, all five of her children slept in her bedroom.
“Suddenly they were thrown into an R-rated movie in their living room,” she added.
Freundlich and her husband are working to safeguard their own home, and they are currently receiving help from the Israel Embassy’s security force, as well as El Al Airlines security team and the local Beijing police.
“We have taken on different measures to put better security measures at the school and the Chabad house,” she said. They are improving video surveillance in both buildings, and on Friday nights, Beijing police officers will patrol the area. Freundlich herself is equipped to do anything from directing a taxi driver to handling a problematic situation — because she decided to learn the local language, Mandarin.
“You have to learn the language,” she said. “I had to go to the grocery store and shop; I had to tell a taxi driver to turn right or left.”
But at the same time, like all of the resilient women at the Women’s Conference, Freundlich pressed on with her programs, where she said she has 50 children attending her secular studies school. In the evening she guides her two oldest children through their Webcam Judaic studies class, where they learn with an instructor alongside three girls from Europe.
“They go on early — an hour before — and stay an hour after for the social opportunity,” she said.
Much closer to the tragedy in distance and in friendship, the Lifshitzes made sure to visit the devastated community for a Chanukah menorah lighting, just one month after the attack. But as they grieve, Lifshitz and her family also move forward, and they continue to serve Shabbat dinners to backpackers each week and to prepare for their huge Passover seders.
“When you are part of a unique army such as ours, you can never wallow in mud,” she told the nearly 3,000 women. “We are the path.”
Wednesday, February 18, 2009
Moshe's grandfather wants him to be India's Rabbi
Rabbi Gavriel's parents are in India on a two-week trip to collect funds
for rebuilding Nariman House, the place where the terrorists killed his son and daughter-in-law Rivka.
His father says Baby Moshe, who was saved by his Indian nanny is doing much better now. And he hopes that one day he will become the Rabbi for India.
"Chabad House will be just like before. I hope a lot more stronger, bigger and that would be a victory against the terrorists. They think it is a victory to kill innocent people, women and children. Our answer to them is just more stronger: to come back and to help more people," said Rabbi Nachman Holtzberg, father of killed Rabbi Gavriel.
On being asked how is Baby Moshe doing now, Rabbi Nachman Holtzberg said, "Thank God a lot better from what he was before. Sometimes he calls out for his parents because he sees something and remembers what happened in Bombay."
Rabbi Holtzberg emphasised that one day Baby Moshe will be the Rabbi of India.
for rebuilding Nariman House, the place where the terrorists killed his son and daughter-in-law Rivka.
His father says Baby Moshe, who was saved by his Indian nanny is doing much better now. And he hopes that one day he will become the Rabbi for India.
"Chabad House will be just like before. I hope a lot more stronger, bigger and that would be a victory against the terrorists. They think it is a victory to kill innocent people, women and children. Our answer to them is just more stronger: to come back and to help more people," said Rabbi Nachman Holtzberg, father of killed Rabbi Gavriel.
On being asked how is Baby Moshe doing now, Rabbi Nachman Holtzberg said, "Thank God a lot better from what he was before. Sometimes he calls out for his parents because he sees something and remembers what happened in Bombay."
Rabbi Holtzberg emphasised that one day Baby Moshe will be the Rabbi of India.
Slain rabbi's kin want to rebuild Jewish centre
MUMBAI: A nauseating smell emanates from the rubble and strewn furniture as Rabbi Nachman Holtzberg and his wife Frieda rummage through the belongings of their dead son Gavriel who ran Chabad House in south Mumbai. The house was the city headquarters of the ultra orthodox Hasidic Jews.
The couple and their sons Moshe and Avraham have come to Mumbai from Brooklyn on a two-week sojourn. On Friday morning, the rabbi and his wife visited the deserted Chabad House building, which is more popularly known as Nariman House. During his stay here, the rabbi plans to connect with the local Jewish community, and perform religious ceremonies and duties related to the traditional Friday night meals that his son once performed.
A lone, unarmed security guard lets us in. The tragedy that occurred here a little over two months ago slowly seeps in. On November 26 last year, two Pakistani terrorists targeted the building and killed 29-year-old Gavriel and his wife Rivka, who was five months pregnant.
Accompanied by their hefty Israeli escort, security expert Avi Cohen, the couple inspect the damage to the structure and stare at stains on the walls that appear to be blood. Rabbi Holtzberg picks up stacks of Hebrew books from the floor. His wife Frieda points to a corner and says, "This is where he died." referring to Gavriel.
Earlier, talking to TOI at a south Mumbai hotel, Rabbi Holtzberg said his family's mission now was to seek donations from Indians to rebuild Chabad House. "In our estimate, we'll require at least $ 2 million (approx Rs 10 crore) to get it up and running with enhanced security," he said. "This was a home not only for Jews, but every person, from every other community. Now we need support from the Indian community to come forward and help it start again," he added. The Holtzbergs have already collected some funds from the US and Europe.
Frieda Holtzberg is worried about her two-year-old grandson Moshe, who became a symbol of hope and survival during the terrorist carnage. The boy was miraculously rescued by his nanny Sandra Samuel. They have since moved to Israel. "He is not only a son of Israel, but now of the entire world," his grandparents said. But mundane worries persist, and the couple plan to start a fund to secure his future. "He's happy in Israel, but sometimes still calls out for his parents," says his grandmother.
The rabbi's two sons are however upset that there has been no word of apology from the Indian authorities. "So far we haven't heard from anyone. There is no apology, no support, no statement, no phone calls from the Indian government," said Moshe, adding that both the past and present US presidents had expressed concern.
The couple and their sons Moshe and Avraham have come to Mumbai from Brooklyn on a two-week sojourn. On Friday morning, the rabbi and his wife visited the deserted Chabad House building, which is more popularly known as Nariman House. During his stay here, the rabbi plans to connect with the local Jewish community, and perform religious ceremonies and duties related to the traditional Friday night meals that his son once performed.
A lone, unarmed security guard lets us in. The tragedy that occurred here a little over two months ago slowly seeps in. On November 26 last year, two Pakistani terrorists targeted the building and killed 29-year-old Gavriel and his wife Rivka, who was five months pregnant.
Accompanied by their hefty Israeli escort, security expert Avi Cohen, the couple inspect the damage to the structure and stare at stains on the walls that appear to be blood. Rabbi Holtzberg picks up stacks of Hebrew books from the floor. His wife Frieda points to a corner and says, "This is where he died." referring to Gavriel.
Earlier, talking to TOI at a south Mumbai hotel, Rabbi Holtzberg said his family's mission now was to seek donations from Indians to rebuild Chabad House. "In our estimate, we'll require at least $ 2 million (approx Rs 10 crore) to get it up and running with enhanced security," he said. "This was a home not only for Jews, but every person, from every other community. Now we need support from the Indian community to come forward and help it start again," he added. The Holtzbergs have already collected some funds from the US and Europe.
Frieda Holtzberg is worried about her two-year-old grandson Moshe, who became a symbol of hope and survival during the terrorist carnage. The boy was miraculously rescued by his nanny Sandra Samuel. They have since moved to Israel. "He is not only a son of Israel, but now of the entire world," his grandparents said. But mundane worries persist, and the couple plan to start a fund to secure his future. "He's happy in Israel, but sometimes still calls out for his parents," says his grandmother.
The rabbi's two sons are however upset that there has been no word of apology from the Indian authorities. "So far we haven't heard from anyone. There is no apology, no support, no statement, no phone calls from the Indian government," said Moshe, adding that both the past and present US presidents had expressed concern.
26/11: Rabbi's parents want to rebuild Chabad House
Mumbai terror attack
Mumbai: The parents of the late Rabbi Gavriel, who was killed during the November 26 terror attacks here last year, have announced plans to raise Rs100 million to reconstruct the ravaged Jewish centre in south Mumbai.
Rabbi Nachman Holtzberg, accompanied by his wife Frieda, and their sons Avraham and Moshe, visited the Chabad House, the Mumbai headquarters of the ultra-orthodox Hasidic Jews, situated inside the better-known Nariman House, near the southern tip of the city.
They examined the belongings of Gavriel and his wife Rivka, who was five months pregnant at the time of the attacks. Their two-year-old son Moshe was miraculously saved from the attacks by his nanny, Sandra Samuel.
Soon after the attacks, they were taken to Israel and now Moshe has become a darling of that country and Jews worldwide. His grandparents and other relatives who look after him say that every now and then, he cries for his dead parents.
The Holtzbergs walked through the mounds of rubble, damaged or broken furniture lying around, books and other household articles gathering dust.
The signs of the November 26, 2008 attacks, and its tragic consequences, are still visible inside and outside the building, guarded now by a single unarmed guard.
Rabbi Holtzberg is hoping for the help of even local Indians for the reconstruction and rebuilding efforts since the place was not just for the Jews, but members of other communities too.
So far, they have raised some funds - for the rebuilding of the Chabad House - from Europe and the US, but will need much more, an estimated Rs100 million, to make it rise again with enhanced facilities and security systems.
The All India Jews Federation president Jonathan Solomon confirmed he had heard about the proposed plans to reconstruct Chabad House. "However, even I have no details and probably, the Israeli consular authorities may be aware of this," he said.
Mumbai: The parents of the late Rabbi Gavriel, who was killed during the November 26 terror attacks here last year, have announced plans to raise Rs100 million to reconstruct the ravaged Jewish centre in south Mumbai.
Rabbi Nachman Holtzberg, accompanied by his wife Frieda, and their sons Avraham and Moshe, visited the Chabad House, the Mumbai headquarters of the ultra-orthodox Hasidic Jews, situated inside the better-known Nariman House, near the southern tip of the city.
They examined the belongings of Gavriel and his wife Rivka, who was five months pregnant at the time of the attacks. Their two-year-old son Moshe was miraculously saved from the attacks by his nanny, Sandra Samuel.
Soon after the attacks, they were taken to Israel and now Moshe has become a darling of that country and Jews worldwide. His grandparents and other relatives who look after him say that every now and then, he cries for his dead parents.
The Holtzbergs walked through the mounds of rubble, damaged or broken furniture lying around, books and other household articles gathering dust.
The signs of the November 26, 2008 attacks, and its tragic consequences, are still visible inside and outside the building, guarded now by a single unarmed guard.
Rabbi Holtzberg is hoping for the help of even local Indians for the reconstruction and rebuilding efforts since the place was not just for the Jews, but members of other communities too.
So far, they have raised some funds - for the rebuilding of the Chabad House - from Europe and the US, but will need much more, an estimated Rs100 million, to make it rise again with enhanced facilities and security systems.
The All India Jews Federation president Jonathan Solomon confirmed he had heard about the proposed plans to reconstruct Chabad House. "However, even I have no details and probably, the Israeli consular authorities may be aware of this," he said.
Thursday, January 01, 2009
Indian Jewish leader: Killers were ‘warped monsters’
By Lincoln Anderson
Three weeks after the deadly Mumbai terrorist attack, the leader of a group of Indian Jews came to the Village Temple to give an insider’s perspective on the horrifying act of violence that shocked the world.
Romiel Daniel is president of the Indian Jewish Congregation of USA, which includes about 350 Indian Jews, living mainly in the New York and New Jersey area. They normally worship in Rego Park, Queens; but on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur — when the Village Temple shifts its enlarged services to The Cooper Union’s Great Hall — the Indian Jews gather at the E. 12th St. synagogue.
Daniel grew up in Mumbai — which he still interchangeably refers to by its former name, “Bombay” — and has lived in New York the last 15 years.
After Friday night Shabbat services at the Village Temple on Dec. 19, Daniel took the podium in the dining room, as a group of about 50 adults and children sat listening attentively, while snacking on cheese, grapes and cookies.
At the outset, he noted that Jews have lived peacefully in India for 2,000 years, attributing this fact to a lack of government-sponsored discrimination.
The 10 drug-and-steroid-fueled Mumbai gunmen were members of a Pakistan-based, Muslim terrorist group.
“What did these terrorists want?” Daniel asked.
“They wanted to hurt and embarrass India,” he said. “They were jealous of India’s prosperity and education.”
Noting that the terrorists singled out American and British people, Daniel said, “They attacked all those who were from successful democratic societies. … Their own societies have not progressed in the last 50 years.”
The gunmen also targeted a Chabad House — a Jewish outreach center — “and they killed all five of our people,” Daniel said. The victims included Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg and his wife, Rivka Holtzberg, who was six months pregnant, a kosher supervisor and a Mexican Jew who was making aliyah — or immigrating — to Israel.
“Why did they kill them?” Daniel asked. “It was just plain hatred.”
“We do not fear these terrorists — warped monsters who will fade into oblivion,” he stated, adding that the lone surviving Muslim fanatic’s last name translates into “butcher.”
As much as they selected their victims, the terrorists also murdered indiscriminately: Of the more than 170 people killed, 79 were Muslim, Daniel added.
“India has never allowed a Jewish soul to lose its life on Indian soil for anti-Semitism, or because you are a Jew,” he reiterated. “India, where we Jews have lived trouble-free for more than 2,000 years.”
Daniel then offered a prayer, tying it in with the approaching Hanukkah holiday, and ending with the words “Let not a unique people perish.”
The Indian Jewish leader then took questions from the audience. He was asked about the relations between Chabad-Lubavitch — the Hasidic sect that operates the Chabad centers — and the Indian Jewish community. The relationship has been very good, he said.
There are quite a few Chabad Houses in India, Daniel went on. That’s because the Lubavitchers are trying to keep Jewish tourists from converting to Buddhism. The Dalai Lama — the spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhism — lives in exile in India, where many seek him out, visit ashrams and generally become “JewBoos,” as they are known. There are “thousands and thousands of JewBoos,” Daniel noted.
“At any given time, there are more than 30,000 Israeli tourists in India,” he said. “Unfortunately, they forget for a while that they’re Jewish.”
Most of these Israelis are “army types,” who come to enjoy India’s beaches — especially “the nude beaches,” added David Galsurkar, a fellow Indian Jew, with a smile.
A total of 4,000 Jews live in India.
There are 12 synagogues in Mumbai and its surrounding area. Although these temples are in a Muslim area, “They have never been attacked; they’ve never been touched,” Daniel noted.
The gunmen instead chose to aim their hatred at the Chabad House, because the Lubavitchers “are easily recognized as Jews internationally,” Daniel said.
He added that India’s good relations with Israel may also have been a factor.
“Israel is India’s second-largest trading partner,” Daniel said. “This is what people don’t like, because it’s India and Israel — not a Muslim country.”
Japan is India’s number-one trading partner. The terrorists killed a Japanese businessman.
Janet Falk, president of the Village Temple’s sisterhood, noted that since 9/11, “We live in a different world here — more security. Do you think similar measures will be taken in India?” she asked.
Daniel said security is improving.
“Before they had no security,” he said. “They didn’t think they needed it.” In the wake of the attack, the government is providing protection for synagogues and Jewish centers, he said. Though, he seemed to indicate that, in the future, this might not remain the case.
Galsurkar said every Bene Israel member — as the Indian Jews call themselves — returns to India every two or three years, and that he was in Mumbai when the attack occurred. Rabbi Holtzberg and his wife were very close with the Indian Jewish community, he noted.
Galsurkar said that after the attack — in what was a new sight for him — he found synagogues’ gates closed.
Jews first came to India about 2,000 years ago as traders, Daniel explained. In a holiday tie-in, he noted these ancestors had fled persecution by Antiochus IV, during whose reign the events of Hanukkah — and the lamp oil that miraculously lasted eight days — occurred.
Three weeks after the deadly Mumbai terrorist attack, the leader of a group of Indian Jews came to the Village Temple to give an insider’s perspective on the horrifying act of violence that shocked the world.
Romiel Daniel is president of the Indian Jewish Congregation of USA, which includes about 350 Indian Jews, living mainly in the New York and New Jersey area. They normally worship in Rego Park, Queens; but on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur — when the Village Temple shifts its enlarged services to The Cooper Union’s Great Hall — the Indian Jews gather at the E. 12th St. synagogue.
Daniel grew up in Mumbai — which he still interchangeably refers to by its former name, “Bombay” — and has lived in New York the last 15 years.
After Friday night Shabbat services at the Village Temple on Dec. 19, Daniel took the podium in the dining room, as a group of about 50 adults and children sat listening attentively, while snacking on cheese, grapes and cookies.
At the outset, he noted that Jews have lived peacefully in India for 2,000 years, attributing this fact to a lack of government-sponsored discrimination.
The 10 drug-and-steroid-fueled Mumbai gunmen were members of a Pakistan-based, Muslim terrorist group.
“What did these terrorists want?” Daniel asked.
“They wanted to hurt and embarrass India,” he said. “They were jealous of India’s prosperity and education.”
Noting that the terrorists singled out American and British people, Daniel said, “They attacked all those who were from successful democratic societies. … Their own societies have not progressed in the last 50 years.”
The gunmen also targeted a Chabad House — a Jewish outreach center — “and they killed all five of our people,” Daniel said. The victims included Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg and his wife, Rivka Holtzberg, who was six months pregnant, a kosher supervisor and a Mexican Jew who was making aliyah — or immigrating — to Israel.
“Why did they kill them?” Daniel asked. “It was just plain hatred.”
“We do not fear these terrorists — warped monsters who will fade into oblivion,” he stated, adding that the lone surviving Muslim fanatic’s last name translates into “butcher.”
As much as they selected their victims, the terrorists also murdered indiscriminately: Of the more than 170 people killed, 79 were Muslim, Daniel added.
“India has never allowed a Jewish soul to lose its life on Indian soil for anti-Semitism, or because you are a Jew,” he reiterated. “India, where we Jews have lived trouble-free for more than 2,000 years.”
Daniel then offered a prayer, tying it in with the approaching Hanukkah holiday, and ending with the words “Let not a unique people perish.”
The Indian Jewish leader then took questions from the audience. He was asked about the relations between Chabad-Lubavitch — the Hasidic sect that operates the Chabad centers — and the Indian Jewish community. The relationship has been very good, he said.
There are quite a few Chabad Houses in India, Daniel went on. That’s because the Lubavitchers are trying to keep Jewish tourists from converting to Buddhism. The Dalai Lama — the spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhism — lives in exile in India, where many seek him out, visit ashrams and generally become “JewBoos,” as they are known. There are “thousands and thousands of JewBoos,” Daniel noted.
“At any given time, there are more than 30,000 Israeli tourists in India,” he said. “Unfortunately, they forget for a while that they’re Jewish.”
Most of these Israelis are “army types,” who come to enjoy India’s beaches — especially “the nude beaches,” added David Galsurkar, a fellow Indian Jew, with a smile.
A total of 4,000 Jews live in India.
There are 12 synagogues in Mumbai and its surrounding area. Although these temples are in a Muslim area, “They have never been attacked; they’ve never been touched,” Daniel noted.
The gunmen instead chose to aim their hatred at the Chabad House, because the Lubavitchers “are easily recognized as Jews internationally,” Daniel said.
He added that India’s good relations with Israel may also have been a factor.
“Israel is India’s second-largest trading partner,” Daniel said. “This is what people don’t like, because it’s India and Israel — not a Muslim country.”
Japan is India’s number-one trading partner. The terrorists killed a Japanese businessman.
Janet Falk, president of the Village Temple’s sisterhood, noted that since 9/11, “We live in a different world here — more security. Do you think similar measures will be taken in India?” she asked.
Daniel said security is improving.
“Before they had no security,” he said. “They didn’t think they needed it.” In the wake of the attack, the government is providing protection for synagogues and Jewish centers, he said. Though, he seemed to indicate that, in the future, this might not remain the case.
Galsurkar said every Bene Israel member — as the Indian Jews call themselves — returns to India every two or three years, and that he was in Mumbai when the attack occurred. Rabbi Holtzberg and his wife were very close with the Indian Jewish community, he noted.
Galsurkar said that after the attack — in what was a new sight for him — he found synagogues’ gates closed.
Jews first came to India about 2,000 years ago as traders, Daniel explained. In a holiday tie-in, he noted these ancestors had fled persecution by Antiochus IV, during whose reign the events of Hanukkah — and the lamp oil that miraculously lasted eight days — occurred.
Tuesday, December 30, 2008
Mumbai's far-reaching impact
Dec. 29, 2008
dovid eliezrie
THE JERUSALEM POST
Jewish tradition tells us the first 30 days of mourning are the most intense. This week we mark end of this period since the terrorist attack against the Chabad Center in Mumbai. It's been a watershed event for world Jewry and Chabad. It will have a long lasting effect in diverse ways.
It has sparked an existential dialogue within Chabad. "Why have we become a target for the unfathomable." A few days after the attack, a group of Jewish security experts told me, "You guys are on the frontlines, it was only a matter of time." That's the practical perspective you would expect from security gurus. At a farbrengen held last week for California shluchim that question was at the core of the evening. Rabbi Ezra Schochet, rosh yeshiva, dissected the issue. The intellectual inquiry did not bring him, or us, solace. At the end he said, "We have a question, a question without any answer."
FOR MILLENNIA Jews have grappled with the same questions, seeking to pierce the mystery of divine providence. Shluchim were promised special blessings. Years ago a Chabad supporter suggested to the Rebbe in a private audience that he give more kudos to his shluchim. While the Rebbe showed appreciation, it was done in his classic understated style. Hassidim felt it an honor to serve the Rebbe's higher purposes. After hearing the question, the Rebbe's face took an austere look. He told the man, "They all have children."
Out of the close to 4,000 couples, you can't count on one hand those who do not have children. It's not uncommon in Chabad to find a childless young couples in business make a career change to become shluchim to benefit from this unique spiritual blessing. So how could we, who have had our lives so enriched with so many blessings, lose two of our best to evil is a question gnawing at our souls.
While we have no answer, most of us have taken consolation and inspiration from the Rebbe's message to Kfar Chabad in 1956 after five children and their teacher were killed by terrorists. "In your rebuilding you will find consolation." Last Thursday night the parents of Rabbi Gavriel and Rebbitzen Rivka Holtzberg returned to Mumbai to light the menora. Their message was clear terror will not deter us, only prompt us to achieve more.
Around the world many of us have undertaken new projects. Our community in Yorba Linda, California is writing a Torah scroll in their memory. Just down the freeway, the Chabad Center is placing a shaliah at University of California at Irvine, a hotbed of radical Arab activism. Across the world similar initiatives are being launched.
This tragedy touched a deep chord in the Jewish world.
FOR SOME 36 hours millions watched the drama unfolding. Jews were hunted down and killed for being Jews. Chabad was not attacked as a symbol of the West, as J. J. Goldberg attempted to claim in the Forward. Clearly there were more prominent Western targets in Mumbai. Islamic terrorists sought out Chabad as an objective. A nondescript six-story building tucked away in one the most demographically dense cities in the world. The terrorists searched and found the only rabbi living in the city. Chabad may have been the specific target, but it was an attack on the Jewish people as a whole. It impacted all aspects of the Jewish world. The six victims rooted in the world of Satmar, secular Jews, Zionists and non Zionists.
Sadly in death we were all united. It reminded us of our vulnerability as Jews. It wasn't too long ago that armies marched across Europe in search of Jews, now a force based on religious fundamentalism reaches out from the mountains of Pakistan with the same goals.
THE ATTACK was personal; for the untold numbers of Jews who know a Chabad shaliah, their friend was in mourning. Gabi's father had been my classmate in yeshiva, my son with Gabi himself. Chabad may have grown but we are all interconnected. Our personal pain of reached deep into every Jewish community in the world. Tens of thousands attended hundreds of memorials.
It accentuated a reality that challenges the status quo of Jewish life. Today Chabad is the largest Jewish organization in the world. It eclipses in size and scope all other Jewish groups. As Andrew Silow-Carroll of the New Jersey Jewish News noted, the event has "repositioned Chabad as the de facto Jewish vanguard, and made other Jewish groups acknowledge it." The attack has sparked and rekindling of the relationship between Chabad and other parts of the haredi world.
The schism has deep roots reaching back to split between hassidim and mitnagdim two centuries ago. In modern times it has been intensified for a variety of reasons. The messiah issue worried many. The haredi world responded to the challenge of modernity by erecting barriers. Chabad chose to engage it, look for the good and offer its contribution to all. While most haredim stepped back into their own world, Chabad reached out to others.
AT THE funeral, standing together with hassidic rabbis were President Shimon Peres and leaders of Israel's key parties. Their participation was reflective of Chabad's willingness to play a role in larger society while decisively maintaining Jewish principles. Mumbai was the catalyst for the haredi community to seek reconciliation. As the editor of Yated Ne'eman (different than its Israeli namesake) in the US, a paper that historically would not acknowledge Chabad, wrote in article lauding the Holtzberg's self sacrifice, "We are tribes of a same nation." Strangely it's the shluchim around the world who have laid the ground for this rapprochement. At the shluchim convention held in New York a week before the attack, leaders of Satmar sat at tables of shluchim they have become friends with during their business travels. In recent years even the most insular Lithuanian yeshivot have discovered the importance of outreach.
A few days after their passing, JEM, Chabad's producer of film and video released a hastily assembled memorial video on their lives. They had discovered a rare clip of Rivka Holtzberg talking about her life in Mumbai. Her warmth, charm and inner beauty radiate on the screen. One moment deeply touched me, when asked how can you have dozens for dinner every night, she responds in the typical Israeli, "Zeh kef - its fun." Her joy in giving to others was palatable. If only if each of us could capture a part of that enthusiasm and infuse it into our lives, how much better the world would be.
The writer is a Chabad shaliah in Yorba Linda, California. rabbi@ocjewish.com
dovid eliezrie
THE JERUSALEM POST
Jewish tradition tells us the first 30 days of mourning are the most intense. This week we mark end of this period since the terrorist attack against the Chabad Center in Mumbai. It's been a watershed event for world Jewry and Chabad. It will have a long lasting effect in diverse ways.
It has sparked an existential dialogue within Chabad. "Why have we become a target for the unfathomable." A few days after the attack, a group of Jewish security experts told me, "You guys are on the frontlines, it was only a matter of time." That's the practical perspective you would expect from security gurus. At a farbrengen held last week for California shluchim that question was at the core of the evening. Rabbi Ezra Schochet, rosh yeshiva, dissected the issue. The intellectual inquiry did not bring him, or us, solace. At the end he said, "We have a question, a question without any answer."
FOR MILLENNIA Jews have grappled with the same questions, seeking to pierce the mystery of divine providence. Shluchim were promised special blessings. Years ago a Chabad supporter suggested to the Rebbe in a private audience that he give more kudos to his shluchim. While the Rebbe showed appreciation, it was done in his classic understated style. Hassidim felt it an honor to serve the Rebbe's higher purposes. After hearing the question, the Rebbe's face took an austere look. He told the man, "They all have children."
Out of the close to 4,000 couples, you can't count on one hand those who do not have children. It's not uncommon in Chabad to find a childless young couples in business make a career change to become shluchim to benefit from this unique spiritual blessing. So how could we, who have had our lives so enriched with so many blessings, lose two of our best to evil is a question gnawing at our souls.
While we have no answer, most of us have taken consolation and inspiration from the Rebbe's message to Kfar Chabad in 1956 after five children and their teacher were killed by terrorists. "In your rebuilding you will find consolation." Last Thursday night the parents of Rabbi Gavriel and Rebbitzen Rivka Holtzberg returned to Mumbai to light the menora. Their message was clear terror will not deter us, only prompt us to achieve more.
Around the world many of us have undertaken new projects. Our community in Yorba Linda, California is writing a Torah scroll in their memory. Just down the freeway, the Chabad Center is placing a shaliah at University of California at Irvine, a hotbed of radical Arab activism. Across the world similar initiatives are being launched.
This tragedy touched a deep chord in the Jewish world.
FOR SOME 36 hours millions watched the drama unfolding. Jews were hunted down and killed for being Jews. Chabad was not attacked as a symbol of the West, as J. J. Goldberg attempted to claim in the Forward. Clearly there were more prominent Western targets in Mumbai. Islamic terrorists sought out Chabad as an objective. A nondescript six-story building tucked away in one the most demographically dense cities in the world. The terrorists searched and found the only rabbi living in the city. Chabad may have been the specific target, but it was an attack on the Jewish people as a whole. It impacted all aspects of the Jewish world. The six victims rooted in the world of Satmar, secular Jews, Zionists and non Zionists.
Sadly in death we were all united. It reminded us of our vulnerability as Jews. It wasn't too long ago that armies marched across Europe in search of Jews, now a force based on religious fundamentalism reaches out from the mountains of Pakistan with the same goals.
THE ATTACK was personal; for the untold numbers of Jews who know a Chabad shaliah, their friend was in mourning. Gabi's father had been my classmate in yeshiva, my son with Gabi himself. Chabad may have grown but we are all interconnected. Our personal pain of reached deep into every Jewish community in the world. Tens of thousands attended hundreds of memorials.
It accentuated a reality that challenges the status quo of Jewish life. Today Chabad is the largest Jewish organization in the world. It eclipses in size and scope all other Jewish groups. As Andrew Silow-Carroll of the New Jersey Jewish News noted, the event has "repositioned Chabad as the de facto Jewish vanguard, and made other Jewish groups acknowledge it." The attack has sparked and rekindling of the relationship between Chabad and other parts of the haredi world.
The schism has deep roots reaching back to split between hassidim and mitnagdim two centuries ago. In modern times it has been intensified for a variety of reasons. The messiah issue worried many. The haredi world responded to the challenge of modernity by erecting barriers. Chabad chose to engage it, look for the good and offer its contribution to all. While most haredim stepped back into their own world, Chabad reached out to others.
AT THE funeral, standing together with hassidic rabbis were President Shimon Peres and leaders of Israel's key parties. Their participation was reflective of Chabad's willingness to play a role in larger society while decisively maintaining Jewish principles. Mumbai was the catalyst for the haredi community to seek reconciliation. As the editor of Yated Ne'eman (different than its Israeli namesake) in the US, a paper that historically would not acknowledge Chabad, wrote in article lauding the Holtzberg's self sacrifice, "We are tribes of a same nation." Strangely it's the shluchim around the world who have laid the ground for this rapprochement. At the shluchim convention held in New York a week before the attack, leaders of Satmar sat at tables of shluchim they have become friends with during their business travels. In recent years even the most insular Lithuanian yeshivot have discovered the importance of outreach.
A few days after their passing, JEM, Chabad's producer of film and video released a hastily assembled memorial video on their lives. They had discovered a rare clip of Rivka Holtzberg talking about her life in Mumbai. Her warmth, charm and inner beauty radiate on the screen. One moment deeply touched me, when asked how can you have dozens for dinner every night, she responds in the typical Israeli, "Zeh kef - its fun." Her joy in giving to others was palatable. If only if each of us could capture a part of that enthusiasm and infuse it into our lives, how much better the world would be.
The writer is a Chabad shaliah in Yorba Linda, California. rabbi@ocjewish.com
TERROR IN MUMBAI Chabad encounter
LYLA BAVADAM
in Mumbai
Interview with Sharon Galsurkar, who worked with the security forces in the operation to free Nariman House.
SHARON GALSURKAR knew Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg and his wife Rivka from the time the couple came to live in India six years ago. He is a community programmer with the Organisation for Rehabilitation and Training, a Jewish outreach society. He was closely involved with assisting the Army and the police during the operations to flush out the terrorists from Nariman House, drawing them a sketch of the layout of the interiors, liaising with the security forces and the Israelis, and interacting with local residents who pointed out various approaches to the building. When Sandra Samuel and baby Moshe escaped, he took them home for a while so that the child could be “in a relaxed atmosphere”.
Three days after the carnage, in which 11 people, including two terrorists, died, Galsurkar and a ZAKA team went in to collect the belongings of the dead and to clean up. (ZAKA, an abbreviation for Zihuy Korbanot Ason, which means Identification of Victims of Disaster, is an Israeli voluntary organisation. It works along with law enforcers in response to terrorism, accidents or disasters.) Their task included cleaning the blood on the floor, on clothing and on bedsheets. Galsurkar described this as the “most horrible work I have ever done in my life” .
He spoke to Frontline about these experiences and his concerns as an Indian Jew. Excerpts:
You took Sandra Samuel and baby Moshe home after they escaped. What was her account to you?
Sandra and Zakir [Hussein, the cook] were in the kitchen on the first floor. They were preparing dinner – some beans and chicken. Sandra said that the rabbi and two other men and Rivka were in the synagogue on the second floor, which is also a library. And the child was sleeping on the fifth floor. Two women were on the fourth floor…at least that’s where they were found…. Sandra didn’t say where they were when the gunmen entered. Sandra said she came out when she heard firing. They fired in her direction and she and Zakir ran into the kitchen and shut the door. They both hid in a storeroom behind some fridges. That’s how they survived the grenade too. There was firing all through the night. All the glass was smashed, so they could figure out people’s movements because of their footsteps on the glass. Around 1.30 that morning she heard Rivka crying. She cried very loudly for about 25 minutes or half an hour. And then she stopped and after that they only heard gunfire and explosions.
In the morning Sandra said both she and Zakir decided to take a chance. They came out and she heard Moshe crying on the second floor. She said she could not go without the child… so they both climbed slowly up to the second floor… this was very daring of them… Zakir kept watch on the landing and Sandra picked up the child. He was on the floor with blood splattered all over him. Then they slowly climbed downstairs and came out of the house.
She said the rabbi and his wife were unconscious and needed help.
Yes, that’s what she said, but judging by the amount of blood she described I felt they were gone. I am a trained social worker. I know how people react when they are in trauma and I understand their reactions. My feeling is that Sandra knew that the rabbi and his wife were dead. There was just too much blood around for them to still be alive. I felt that when Sandra said they were unconscious she was hoping they were still alive. Maybe if she had conveyed her fears to the police, it might have helped finish the operation earlier.
You worked with the ZAKA team.
Yes, it was quite by chance. It was Friday evening, about one hour before Sabbath. We have very strict rules during Sabbath, which can be broken only in life-threatening situations. It was great luck that before Sabbath we discovered the ZAKA team. They were about six of them waiting in one of the lanes near the Chabad. We offered our help. By 8.30, the operations were over. Three bodies were taken out – the rabbi, Rivka and Bentzion [Chroman, a kosher food superviser]. One body had already been sent to JJ [Hospital] and one of us went there to stop the post-mortem [forbidden under Jewish religious law]. The other bodies couldn’t be brought out because there were hand grenades around them. The Army finally exploded eight hand grenades that night. The bodies were in terrible shape. It took till 3.30 on Saturday morning to finish the procedures at the JJ mortuary.
The bodies were sent to Pinto’s [mortician who prepared the bodies for travel]. We read psalms, asked for forgiveness from the rabbi – this is a ritual we have. On Sunday, we collected the blood-soaked clothes and bedsheets from the Colaba police station. Then we sorted them out because they had to be buried with the people they belonged to. On Monday we got police permission to enter the Chabad house. That is when I did the most horrible work I have ever done in my life…. picking up blood… it was semi-liquid – it was thick, a terrible stench came from it when we picked it up. There was the smell of decomposition all over and our eyes burnt terribly…maybe the Army had released some gas or something during the operations. We had the right gear but still…. This is on the fourth floor [shows photograph] – this is the room where the two women were tied. They were tied together so that the head of one was at the feet of the other. I don’t know why this was done.
The floor of the synagogue was covered with blood. Even the material with which we cleaned the blood was put in with the bodies. We took away the four Torah scrolls and some religious articles. Nothing was desecrated but one of the scrolls had a spray of bullets over it.
What were your general impressions while you assisted the security forces?
The Army and the police did everything they could. Experts may say that the operation failed, but I saw them working – they took all risks, they worked hard.
ZAKA was unhappy with them.
That’s because they were thinking from the Israeli perspective. They face this sort of situation so regularly. Part of their response is not to waste time. We know our problems. I can’t comment on the details of the operation, but I know our people were working hard. Our commandos and policemen were at a range where they could easily have died. They put their lives on the line – I appreciate that. I salute them.
What is the Jewish community’s thinking on security now?
As Jews, we believe that whatever has happened has happened for a reason but this does not stop me from taking security measures. We have been told to use grills, stronger doors, more fortification, security personnel. We have asked for security from the Mumbai Police and they have given it. One of the things the [Israeli] Consulate pointed out, especially to the Chabad [some months ago], is that the door should have more than one guard and it should be kept closed. A CCTV was also advised. If the Chabad had proper gates and entry rules, it wouldn’t have been easy for the terrorists to get in. They had this idea of open doors and open house – the wrong people took advantage of it.
Maybe it was contradictory to the rabbi’s beliefs? An open house cannot have closed doors.
It was about his trust in God. It was not contradictory because we Jews are supposed to pray and also to make effort. We have to work on our security and ask God for his blessings on this. That’s also Jewish philosophy. We also have a law that says we must not risk our lives. So, if by keeping my door open I risk my life I should keep it closed.
There were people who insisted that they had seen the gunmen before, that they had lived in the Chabad house itself. There was one woman who was evacuated from a neighbouring building at about 1 a.m. on November 27. She had glimpsed the gunmen while the attack was on and said she had definitely seen them before.
I heard they’d stayed in the chawl from where they could see the Chabad house. It was not easy to stay in the Chabad house. If any new person wanted to stay there, the rabbi would check their passports and ensure that they were Jewish because that is not an open guesthouse for anybody. So he was careful about that. These people were aware that they were potential targets. But perhaps the rabbi would not have expected it to happen here and in this way.
I wish the rabbi had done two things. One, that he had interacted more with the Colaba police station. Even they were not aware of the Chabad house. And I wish he had interacted with his neighbours. He didn’t go out of his way to interact with the neighbours… as Indians we are used to having relations with our neighbours. But he came from a different culture.
Why do you wish this?
When we spoke to the neighbours the day after the attack, some of them actually thought that the Chabad was responsible for what was happening. If they knew what Chabad was about they would never have said that. But I can understand the rabbi’s point too – being orthodox…ultra orthodox actually… he lived in his own world. The locals did not even know that this was a Chabad house. The first time I was looking for the place none of them could help me.
Have you been back to talk to the local people?
Not yet, but I will go back. I got the feeling that they did not want the Chabad to come up there again. I want to talk to them, explain what Chabad is all about, tell them that you don’t abandon your neighbours because they were attacked by someone else.
It is interesting you say this because while the operation was on the local residents were very sympathetic and said they would not mind having them as neighbours once this was over. But when the question was put to them again afterwards, they were not so sure because they were shaken by the violence of the operation.
This is why we want to talk to them. We will ask them: “Are you going to say the same things to the Taj, to the Oberoi… will you tell them they should not be here because they were attacked?” They attack, they kill and they have the “success” of the Chabad being thrown out from the neighbourhood.
If local residents are adamant, then maybe the Chabad should not be in the same area. If they are not going to support it, then how will the Chabad house thrive? [Silent for a while.] They were good people… the rabbi had a spiritual aura.
in Mumbai
Interview with Sharon Galsurkar, who worked with the security forces in the operation to free Nariman House.
SHARON GALSURKAR knew Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg and his wife Rivka from the time the couple came to live in India six years ago. He is a community programmer with the Organisation for Rehabilitation and Training, a Jewish outreach society. He was closely involved with assisting the Army and the police during the operations to flush out the terrorists from Nariman House, drawing them a sketch of the layout of the interiors, liaising with the security forces and the Israelis, and interacting with local residents who pointed out various approaches to the building. When Sandra Samuel and baby Moshe escaped, he took them home for a while so that the child could be “in a relaxed atmosphere”.
Three days after the carnage, in which 11 people, including two terrorists, died, Galsurkar and a ZAKA team went in to collect the belongings of the dead and to clean up. (ZAKA, an abbreviation for Zihuy Korbanot Ason, which means Identification of Victims of Disaster, is an Israeli voluntary organisation. It works along with law enforcers in response to terrorism, accidents or disasters.) Their task included cleaning the blood on the floor, on clothing and on bedsheets. Galsurkar described this as the “most horrible work I have ever done in my life” .
He spoke to Frontline about these experiences and his concerns as an Indian Jew. Excerpts:
You took Sandra Samuel and baby Moshe home after they escaped. What was her account to you?
Sandra and Zakir [Hussein, the cook] were in the kitchen on the first floor. They were preparing dinner – some beans and chicken. Sandra said that the rabbi and two other men and Rivka were in the synagogue on the second floor, which is also a library. And the child was sleeping on the fifth floor. Two women were on the fourth floor…at least that’s where they were found…. Sandra didn’t say where they were when the gunmen entered. Sandra said she came out when she heard firing. They fired in her direction and she and Zakir ran into the kitchen and shut the door. They both hid in a storeroom behind some fridges. That’s how they survived the grenade too. There was firing all through the night. All the glass was smashed, so they could figure out people’s movements because of their footsteps on the glass. Around 1.30 that morning she heard Rivka crying. She cried very loudly for about 25 minutes or half an hour. And then she stopped and after that they only heard gunfire and explosions.
In the morning Sandra said both she and Zakir decided to take a chance. They came out and she heard Moshe crying on the second floor. She said she could not go without the child… so they both climbed slowly up to the second floor… this was very daring of them… Zakir kept watch on the landing and Sandra picked up the child. He was on the floor with blood splattered all over him. Then they slowly climbed downstairs and came out of the house.
She said the rabbi and his wife were unconscious and needed help.
Yes, that’s what she said, but judging by the amount of blood she described I felt they were gone. I am a trained social worker. I know how people react when they are in trauma and I understand their reactions. My feeling is that Sandra knew that the rabbi and his wife were dead. There was just too much blood around for them to still be alive. I felt that when Sandra said they were unconscious she was hoping they were still alive. Maybe if she had conveyed her fears to the police, it might have helped finish the operation earlier.
You worked with the ZAKA team.
Yes, it was quite by chance. It was Friday evening, about one hour before Sabbath. We have very strict rules during Sabbath, which can be broken only in life-threatening situations. It was great luck that before Sabbath we discovered the ZAKA team. They were about six of them waiting in one of the lanes near the Chabad. We offered our help. By 8.30, the operations were over. Three bodies were taken out – the rabbi, Rivka and Bentzion [Chroman, a kosher food superviser]. One body had already been sent to JJ [Hospital] and one of us went there to stop the post-mortem [forbidden under Jewish religious law]. The other bodies couldn’t be brought out because there were hand grenades around them. The Army finally exploded eight hand grenades that night. The bodies were in terrible shape. It took till 3.30 on Saturday morning to finish the procedures at the JJ mortuary.
The bodies were sent to Pinto’s [mortician who prepared the bodies for travel]. We read psalms, asked for forgiveness from the rabbi – this is a ritual we have. On Sunday, we collected the blood-soaked clothes and bedsheets from the Colaba police station. Then we sorted them out because they had to be buried with the people they belonged to. On Monday we got police permission to enter the Chabad house. That is when I did the most horrible work I have ever done in my life…. picking up blood… it was semi-liquid – it was thick, a terrible stench came from it when we picked it up. There was the smell of decomposition all over and our eyes burnt terribly…maybe the Army had released some gas or something during the operations. We had the right gear but still…. This is on the fourth floor [shows photograph] – this is the room where the two women were tied. They were tied together so that the head of one was at the feet of the other. I don’t know why this was done.
The floor of the synagogue was covered with blood. Even the material with which we cleaned the blood was put in with the bodies. We took away the four Torah scrolls and some religious articles. Nothing was desecrated but one of the scrolls had a spray of bullets over it.
What were your general impressions while you assisted the security forces?
The Army and the police did everything they could. Experts may say that the operation failed, but I saw them working – they took all risks, they worked hard.
ZAKA was unhappy with them.
That’s because they were thinking from the Israeli perspective. They face this sort of situation so regularly. Part of their response is not to waste time. We know our problems. I can’t comment on the details of the operation, but I know our people were working hard. Our commandos and policemen were at a range where they could easily have died. They put their lives on the line – I appreciate that. I salute them.
What is the Jewish community’s thinking on security now?
As Jews, we believe that whatever has happened has happened for a reason but this does not stop me from taking security measures. We have been told to use grills, stronger doors, more fortification, security personnel. We have asked for security from the Mumbai Police and they have given it. One of the things the [Israeli] Consulate pointed out, especially to the Chabad [some months ago], is that the door should have more than one guard and it should be kept closed. A CCTV was also advised. If the Chabad had proper gates and entry rules, it wouldn’t have been easy for the terrorists to get in. They had this idea of open doors and open house – the wrong people took advantage of it.
Maybe it was contradictory to the rabbi’s beliefs? An open house cannot have closed doors.
It was about his trust in God. It was not contradictory because we Jews are supposed to pray and also to make effort. We have to work on our security and ask God for his blessings on this. That’s also Jewish philosophy. We also have a law that says we must not risk our lives. So, if by keeping my door open I risk my life I should keep it closed.
There were people who insisted that they had seen the gunmen before, that they had lived in the Chabad house itself. There was one woman who was evacuated from a neighbouring building at about 1 a.m. on November 27. She had glimpsed the gunmen while the attack was on and said she had definitely seen them before.
I heard they’d stayed in the chawl from where they could see the Chabad house. It was not easy to stay in the Chabad house. If any new person wanted to stay there, the rabbi would check their passports and ensure that they were Jewish because that is not an open guesthouse for anybody. So he was careful about that. These people were aware that they were potential targets. But perhaps the rabbi would not have expected it to happen here and in this way.
I wish the rabbi had done two things. One, that he had interacted more with the Colaba police station. Even they were not aware of the Chabad house. And I wish he had interacted with his neighbours. He didn’t go out of his way to interact with the neighbours… as Indians we are used to having relations with our neighbours. But he came from a different culture.
Why do you wish this?
When we spoke to the neighbours the day after the attack, some of them actually thought that the Chabad was responsible for what was happening. If they knew what Chabad was about they would never have said that. But I can understand the rabbi’s point too – being orthodox…ultra orthodox actually… he lived in his own world. The locals did not even know that this was a Chabad house. The first time I was looking for the place none of them could help me.
Have you been back to talk to the local people?
Not yet, but I will go back. I got the feeling that they did not want the Chabad to come up there again. I want to talk to them, explain what Chabad is all about, tell them that you don’t abandon your neighbours because they were attacked by someone else.
It is interesting you say this because while the operation was on the local residents were very sympathetic and said they would not mind having them as neighbours once this was over. But when the question was put to them again afterwards, they were not so sure because they were shaken by the violence of the operation.
This is why we want to talk to them. We will ask them: “Are you going to say the same things to the Taj, to the Oberoi… will you tell them they should not be here because they were attacked?” They attack, they kill and they have the “success” of the Chabad being thrown out from the neighbourhood.
If local residents are adamant, then maybe the Chabad should not be in the same area. If they are not going to support it, then how will the Chabad house thrive? [Silent for a while.] They were good people… the rabbi had a spiritual aura.
Chabad's Tremendous Response to Terror
Stunned, lamenting, action. In the immediate aftermath of the tragedy that struck Mumbai, India on November 26th and 27th, Chabad took action. In tremendous ways, the ultra-orthodox Hassidic Jews redirected their grief into positive action in order to combat the evil that quaked their world.
"This week, no one is celebrating," said Rabbi Pinchos Lipschutz, editor and publisher of the weekly newspaper, Yated Neeman. "But they are more united than ever before. After the atrocities in India, all of us are more united."
Among the hostages who were killed by terrorists at Mumbai's Nariman House were two Chabad Shluchim [emissaries] of the Lubavitcher Rebbe: Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg and his pregnant wife, Rivka.
In Chicago, a crowd of 1,300 showed unity and support at the Skokie Hotel on the evening of November 26th, for the Jewish Community's Memorial Evening of Tribute and Solidarity. Rabbi Daniel Moscowitz, regional director of Chabad Lubavitch of Illinois, read a letter from President-Elect Barack Obama that offered condolences to the entire Jewish community, acknowledged the "mission of service to the Jewish community" which the Holtzbergs provided, and vowed that the "terrorists with no regard for human life" would be brought to justice. Moscowitz then appealed to the crowd to utilize this moment of inspiration to add light to the world by increasing personal acts of goodness and kindness, a response central to Chabad values. Mitzvah-pledge cards were filled out by participants, which Moscowitz will take to the grieving families in Israel. 250 letters of comfort written by students of the Jewish day schools in Chicago will also be delivered. Hundreds of Friday Light kits were distributed to the participants as part of the Shabbat candle-lighting campaign.
Shluchim of Long Island gathered Sunday, November 30th at Chabad of Mineola for a memorial and prayer service, as reported by www.crownheights.info, a leading Chabad news site. The community, consisting of several Chabad institutions, joined in prayer, song, and inspirational speeches. Rabbi Raify Konikov, representing the neighboring Chabad emissaries, was chosen to travel to Israel for the Holtzberg's funeral.
About 1,000 people thronged to Gayley Avenue on Sunday, November 30th, to attend a memorial at the West Coast headquarters of Chabad in Los Angeles, California. Those in attendance paid tribute to the Holtzbergs and the other victims, vowing to combat the evil with acts of goodness, even in the face of the terrorist attacks.
Thousands of Jews, from every corner of the world, regardless of their prior observance, have pledged to do acts of kindness and good deeds in the wake of the terror attack in India. While some have taken upon themselves to light Shabbat candles or don traditional phylacteries, others have resolved to increase contributions to charity, go to their local Chabad House, show more love for their fellow man, learn from the Bible, or offer prayers to G-d. According to Chabad teachings, such deeds serve as the light that dispels darkness. "We must honor the souls of those torn away from us, by immortalizing their lives through our positive deeds," said Rabbi Simon Jacobson, scholar of mysticism and author of the best selling book Toward a Meaningful Life.
Donations have been steadily pouring into funds set up for the rebuilding of the Mumbai Chabad Center and to support the two orphaned Holtzberg children. "I attended a memorial for the victims of Chabad Mumbai at my synagogue on Saturday," said Lucette Lagnado, author and reporter for the Wall Street Journal. "It was very crowded - filled with people I had never seen before. Worshippers went up to the pulpit and pledged thousands of dollars."
Arising from India's 9/11, as the media has termed the attacks, is peace and unity among Jews and even among the media; Jewish communities gathered together to pay tribute to the victims of terror in India, while media exchanged minute-to-minute updates.
In addition to the sorrow Jews are experiencing upon the loss of their own in India, the latest acts of terrorism have had a far-reaching, enabling effect on the entire Jewish community.
"This Shabbat you'll find me at a place I haven't been for years -- my local Chabad," proclaimed Rob Eshman, Editor-in-Chief of the Jewish Journal, on Friday, November 28th. "I hope you do the same. I hope rabbis of all stripes march down with their congregants to do the same."
Mel Konner, author and professor at Emory University in Atlanta, GA, told CNN, "The extremists, the terrorists, the Islamist radicals… hate the prospect of peace among these nations and the possibility of progress and getting away from this violence… Unfortunately in these situations, it's always possible for a small number of people to have an exaggerated effect on everything."
"As we mourn [the Holtzberg] untimely and incomprehensible deaths," said Rabbi Pinchas Allouche, Chabad shliach to Scottsdale, AZ, "it is high time for each of us to continue their work with renewed vigor and conviction." Allouche encouraged Jews to continue to perpetuate Judaism, in their own lives as well as in the lives of every Jew encountered, which is in essence the very mission for which the Holtzbergs sacrificed themselves. "There could not be a sweeter revenge for the barbaric terrorists, may their names be erased, who murdered them so cold-bloodedly," he added.
Naftali Salomon, a friend of the Holtzbergs', related, "Gabi and Rivka's entire goal in life was nothing other than to help a fellow human being in need, bring a fellow Jew closer to Judaism, or to simply put a smile on the face of someone who was feeling down. And they did so with the utmost sacrifice, selflessness and humility; never taking credit for their accomplishments or patting themselves on the back."
"What else can one do but look for the glimmers of light and hope amid the darkness and bitterness?" Salomon said, going on to describe the lasting impact the Holtzbergs had had on those whom they encountered, whether it be through the Jewish ritual bath they established, the prayer services they conducted, the Jewish weddings they presided over, and their son Moshe who "miraculously survived thanks to the heroic nanny."
Perusing the headlines of articles posted on Chabad websites, one would surely notice the influx of news announcements of Chabad-initiated memorials in cities across America as well as internationally, in which entire Jewish communities have joined in mourning. Unity, support, solidarity; Jews have shown their fundamental ties, many disregarding their differences in denomination, by joining together in memorial and action to honor the Holtzbergs and others killed in Mumbai.
"You know, this is the Chabad spirit: turn tears into action and into energy," said Rabbi Shalom Paltiel, a close friend of the Holtzbergs, during his interview on NBC's Today Show.
"In order to succeed in this battle," wrote Uri Orbach in his article titled "Light versus Darkness" published in Ynet News, "we must realize that this is yet another struggle between the sons of light and the sons of darkness. And light shall win."
Today, after the global media coverage of the horrific Anti-Semitic events in Mumbai, the world has more exposure to Judaism and Jews: a people steadfast in their beliefs and selfless acts to bring the world to a better place - one not of darkness, but of light.
It begs the ironic question: was this the terrorists' intent?
"This week, no one is celebrating," said Rabbi Pinchos Lipschutz, editor and publisher of the weekly newspaper, Yated Neeman. "But they are more united than ever before. After the atrocities in India, all of us are more united."
Among the hostages who were killed by terrorists at Mumbai's Nariman House were two Chabad Shluchim [emissaries] of the Lubavitcher Rebbe: Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg and his pregnant wife, Rivka.
In Chicago, a crowd of 1,300 showed unity and support at the Skokie Hotel on the evening of November 26th, for the Jewish Community's Memorial Evening of Tribute and Solidarity. Rabbi Daniel Moscowitz, regional director of Chabad Lubavitch of Illinois, read a letter from President-Elect Barack Obama that offered condolences to the entire Jewish community, acknowledged the "mission of service to the Jewish community" which the Holtzbergs provided, and vowed that the "terrorists with no regard for human life" would be brought to justice. Moscowitz then appealed to the crowd to utilize this moment of inspiration to add light to the world by increasing personal acts of goodness and kindness, a response central to Chabad values. Mitzvah-pledge cards were filled out by participants, which Moscowitz will take to the grieving families in Israel. 250 letters of comfort written by students of the Jewish day schools in Chicago will also be delivered. Hundreds of Friday Light kits were distributed to the participants as part of the Shabbat candle-lighting campaign.
Shluchim of Long Island gathered Sunday, November 30th at Chabad of Mineola for a memorial and prayer service, as reported by www.crownheights.info, a leading Chabad news site. The community, consisting of several Chabad institutions, joined in prayer, song, and inspirational speeches. Rabbi Raify Konikov, representing the neighboring Chabad emissaries, was chosen to travel to Israel for the Holtzberg's funeral.
About 1,000 people thronged to Gayley Avenue on Sunday, November 30th, to attend a memorial at the West Coast headquarters of Chabad in Los Angeles, California. Those in attendance paid tribute to the Holtzbergs and the other victims, vowing to combat the evil with acts of goodness, even in the face of the terrorist attacks.
Thousands of Jews, from every corner of the world, regardless of their prior observance, have pledged to do acts of kindness and good deeds in the wake of the terror attack in India. While some have taken upon themselves to light Shabbat candles or don traditional phylacteries, others have resolved to increase contributions to charity, go to their local Chabad House, show more love for their fellow man, learn from the Bible, or offer prayers to G-d. According to Chabad teachings, such deeds serve as the light that dispels darkness. "We must honor the souls of those torn away from us, by immortalizing their lives through our positive deeds," said Rabbi Simon Jacobson, scholar of mysticism and author of the best selling book Toward a Meaningful Life.
Donations have been steadily pouring into funds set up for the rebuilding of the Mumbai Chabad Center and to support the two orphaned Holtzberg children. "I attended a memorial for the victims of Chabad Mumbai at my synagogue on Saturday," said Lucette Lagnado, author and reporter for the Wall Street Journal. "It was very crowded - filled with people I had never seen before. Worshippers went up to the pulpit and pledged thousands of dollars."
Arising from India's 9/11, as the media has termed the attacks, is peace and unity among Jews and even among the media; Jewish communities gathered together to pay tribute to the victims of terror in India, while media exchanged minute-to-minute updates.
In addition to the sorrow Jews are experiencing upon the loss of their own in India, the latest acts of terrorism have had a far-reaching, enabling effect on the entire Jewish community.
"This Shabbat you'll find me at a place I haven't been for years -- my local Chabad," proclaimed Rob Eshman, Editor-in-Chief of the Jewish Journal, on Friday, November 28th. "I hope you do the same. I hope rabbis of all stripes march down with their congregants to do the same."
Mel Konner, author and professor at Emory University in Atlanta, GA, told CNN, "The extremists, the terrorists, the Islamist radicals… hate the prospect of peace among these nations and the possibility of progress and getting away from this violence… Unfortunately in these situations, it's always possible for a small number of people to have an exaggerated effect on everything."
"As we mourn [the Holtzberg] untimely and incomprehensible deaths," said Rabbi Pinchas Allouche, Chabad shliach to Scottsdale, AZ, "it is high time for each of us to continue their work with renewed vigor and conviction." Allouche encouraged Jews to continue to perpetuate Judaism, in their own lives as well as in the lives of every Jew encountered, which is in essence the very mission for which the Holtzbergs sacrificed themselves. "There could not be a sweeter revenge for the barbaric terrorists, may their names be erased, who murdered them so cold-bloodedly," he added.
Naftali Salomon, a friend of the Holtzbergs', related, "Gabi and Rivka's entire goal in life was nothing other than to help a fellow human being in need, bring a fellow Jew closer to Judaism, or to simply put a smile on the face of someone who was feeling down. And they did so with the utmost sacrifice, selflessness and humility; never taking credit for their accomplishments or patting themselves on the back."
"What else can one do but look for the glimmers of light and hope amid the darkness and bitterness?" Salomon said, going on to describe the lasting impact the Holtzbergs had had on those whom they encountered, whether it be through the Jewish ritual bath they established, the prayer services they conducted, the Jewish weddings they presided over, and their son Moshe who "miraculously survived thanks to the heroic nanny."
Perusing the headlines of articles posted on Chabad websites, one would surely notice the influx of news announcements of Chabad-initiated memorials in cities across America as well as internationally, in which entire Jewish communities have joined in mourning. Unity, support, solidarity; Jews have shown their fundamental ties, many disregarding their differences in denomination, by joining together in memorial and action to honor the Holtzbergs and others killed in Mumbai.
"You know, this is the Chabad spirit: turn tears into action and into energy," said Rabbi Shalom Paltiel, a close friend of the Holtzbergs, during his interview on NBC's Today Show.
"In order to succeed in this battle," wrote Uri Orbach in his article titled "Light versus Darkness" published in Ynet News, "we must realize that this is yet another struggle between the sons of light and the sons of darkness. And light shall win."
Today, after the global media coverage of the horrific Anti-Semitic events in Mumbai, the world has more exposure to Judaism and Jews: a people steadfast in their beliefs and selfless acts to bring the world to a better place - one not of darkness, but of light.
It begs the ironic question: was this the terrorists' intent?
Monday, December 29, 2008
Terrorists' demands were rejected: Digvijay
BHOPAL/MUMBAI: In what seems a political ploy aimed at arguing that unlike NDA, Congress did not succumb to a hostage situation, former CM Digvijay Singh has claimed - contrary to the government's position - that the Centre did not accept demands of terrorists who attacked Mumbai.
The Congress general secretary on Monday reiterated that government had not bowed to demands made by the Lashkar squad, a claim that security sources have dismissed. There were inquiries from Israelis over the claims but these were more to do with the possibility of securing the release of those trapped inside Chabad House.
Throughout the siege of Trident and Taj hotels, apart from Chabad House itself, security forces did not hold any negotiations with the terrorists. In fact, after the terrorists were shot, it was argued that an attempt could have been made to engage them - not to concede any demands but to buy time and possibly negotiate safe release of those trapped in the attack.
Yet, while the Congress spokesperson sought to wriggle out of the situation by claiming that Digvijay Singh had "clarified" the situation, this is not the first time that the former CM has courted controversy. He had previously said that it was "surprising" that when BJP was "in trouble (politically)" bomb blasts happened.
Digvijay Singh on Monday said he stood by his statement that the government had not accepted the demands of terrorists responsible for the Mumbai attacks. Singh sought to place his comments in context of media reports. He said that whatever he had said in Indore was based on these reports and there was no question of retracting his statement.
"I stand by what I said yesterday in Indore," he said. Singh's remark, which came a little over a month after the terror attacks on Mumbai, has created a furore.
He had said that unlike the BJP which gave into the demands of terrorists at Kandahar, the Congress-led government had not negotiated with the militants but had eliminated them.
Again, seeking to make a partisan point, he said there was a big difference between Congress and BJP and added that former external affairs minister Jaswant Singh of BJP had told a TV channel that he would again accept the demands of terrorists if a similar situation arose.
Yet, no just the Centre but Digvijay Singh's own fellow Congressman and Maharashtra home minister Jayant Patil said no demands were made by terrorists during the terror strikes. "From the information made available by Mumbai police, I can say that there were no demands made by the terrorists," Patil said.
"I am not aware on what basis Digvijay Singh has made the statement," the minister added.
Patil's colleague in Nationalist Congress Party R R Patil, who held the home portfolio, resigned on December 1 following criticism of his handling of the home department in the wake of the November 26 attacks.
The Congress general secretary on Monday reiterated that government had not bowed to demands made by the Lashkar squad, a claim that security sources have dismissed. There were inquiries from Israelis over the claims but these were more to do with the possibility of securing the release of those trapped inside Chabad House.
Throughout the siege of Trident and Taj hotels, apart from Chabad House itself, security forces did not hold any negotiations with the terrorists. In fact, after the terrorists were shot, it was argued that an attempt could have been made to engage them - not to concede any demands but to buy time and possibly negotiate safe release of those trapped in the attack.
Yet, while the Congress spokesperson sought to wriggle out of the situation by claiming that Digvijay Singh had "clarified" the situation, this is not the first time that the former CM has courted controversy. He had previously said that it was "surprising" that when BJP was "in trouble (politically)" bomb blasts happened.
Digvijay Singh on Monday said he stood by his statement that the government had not accepted the demands of terrorists responsible for the Mumbai attacks. Singh sought to place his comments in context of media reports. He said that whatever he had said in Indore was based on these reports and there was no question of retracting his statement.
"I stand by what I said yesterday in Indore," he said. Singh's remark, which came a little over a month after the terror attacks on Mumbai, has created a furore.
He had said that unlike the BJP which gave into the demands of terrorists at Kandahar, the Congress-led government had not negotiated with the militants but had eliminated them.
Again, seeking to make a partisan point, he said there was a big difference between Congress and BJP and added that former external affairs minister Jaswant Singh of BJP had told a TV channel that he would again accept the demands of terrorists if a similar situation arose.
Yet, no just the Centre but Digvijay Singh's own fellow Congressman and Maharashtra home minister Jayant Patil said no demands were made by terrorists during the terror strikes. "From the information made available by Mumbai police, I can say that there were no demands made by the terrorists," Patil said.
"I am not aware on what basis Digvijay Singh has made the statement," the minister added.
Patil's colleague in Nationalist Congress Party R R Patil, who held the home portfolio, resigned on December 1 following criticism of his handling of the home department in the wake of the November 26 attacks.
Friday, December 26, 2008
Chabad centre to stay
MUMBAI: Four weeks after the terror attack on Nariman House in which Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg and his wife Rivka and seven others were murdered by gunmen, emissaries of the Chabad Lubavitch movement arrived here to reaffirm their commitment to continuing their work in the city.
At a ceremony at the Gateway of India Rabbi Kotlarsky who is Vice Chairman of the International Conference of Chabad Lubavitch Emissaries said, “We are committed to coming back actually, we are not leaving. We are here and we are not leaving.”
With these words he invited Rabbi Rosenberg, the father of Rivka, to light the menorah. Seated in a manually operated crane, the Rabbi lit five of the oil lamps on the towering 15-foot high menorah. The number signified the fifth day of the Jewish festival, Chanukah.
At an earlier ceremony Rabbi Holtzberg, the father of Rabbi Gavriel, had lit a similar menorah installed at the Chabad centre at Nariman House.
Rabbi Kotlarsky described the Chabad centre as a “beacon of light to the whole world. It has been physically destroyed but the spirit lives on and the activities of Gavriel and Rivka will continue. We will not fight terrorism with AK-47s, grenades or guns. We will fight with beacons of light and goodness.” The Rabbi said it was too early to tell if the centre would continue to operate from Nariman house or elsewhere.
Speaking of the spirit of Chanukah the Rabbi said it was the victory of “few over many, weak over strong.” Chanukah, the festival of lights, spans eight days. On the fourth day of Chanukah two-year-old Moshe, the orphaned child of the Holtzbergs, lit a menorah at his maternal grandparents’ home in Afula, Israel. It had been a tradition with his parents to light a menorah during Chanukah at the Gateway of India ever since they came to Mumbai.
At a ceremony at the Gateway of India Rabbi Kotlarsky who is Vice Chairman of the International Conference of Chabad Lubavitch Emissaries said, “We are committed to coming back actually, we are not leaving. We are here and we are not leaving.”
With these words he invited Rabbi Rosenberg, the father of Rivka, to light the menorah. Seated in a manually operated crane, the Rabbi lit five of the oil lamps on the towering 15-foot high menorah. The number signified the fifth day of the Jewish festival, Chanukah.
At an earlier ceremony Rabbi Holtzberg, the father of Rabbi Gavriel, had lit a similar menorah installed at the Chabad centre at Nariman House.
Rabbi Kotlarsky described the Chabad centre as a “beacon of light to the whole world. It has been physically destroyed but the spirit lives on and the activities of Gavriel and Rivka will continue. We will not fight terrorism with AK-47s, grenades or guns. We will fight with beacons of light and goodness.” The Rabbi said it was too early to tell if the centre would continue to operate from Nariman house or elsewhere.
Speaking of the spirit of Chanukah the Rabbi said it was the victory of “few over many, weak over strong.” Chanukah, the festival of lights, spans eight days. On the fourth day of Chanukah two-year-old Moshe, the orphaned child of the Holtzbergs, lit a menorah at his maternal grandparents’ home in Afula, Israel. It had been a tradition with his parents to light a menorah during Chanukah at the Gateway of India ever since they came to Mumbai.
Monday, December 22, 2008
On Hanukkah's First Night, A Chilling Tale
When he checked out of the Taj Mahal hotel at 3 a.m. on Nov. 26, Greg Morris had no inkling of the terror that would unfold just a few hours later in Mumbai, India.
Some of the terrorists - who went on a three-day rampage of killing that led to more than 170 deaths around Mumbai - had already checked into the hotel when Morris, a South African resident and cousin of local businessmen Mark and Len Wolman, left to take a flight home. He had been in India for two weeks on business for his company, Discovery Insurance.
”It was very much like 9/11,” he said. “This was a terrible attack on our world, against a functioning democracy that subscribes to all our beliefs.”
Morris is visiting the Wolmans this week, and attended the annual lighting of a large menorah on the first day of Hanukkah at the Holiday Inn in New London.
The wind played tricks during the ceremony, but finally Rabbi Avrohom Sternberg of Chabad of Eastern Connecticut was able to light the 15-foot-tall, 2,500-pound symbol of the Jewish holiday season.
The ceremony, said Rabbi Sternberg, was dedicated to the people who died in the attacks -- including six Jews, most prominently Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg and his wife, Rivkah Holtzberg, the directors of the Mumbai Jewish center called Chabad-Lubavitch.
”Everything that comes with a difficulty comes with a strong purpose,” said Rabbi Sternberg during the lighting ceremony. “It is cold outside tonight and it is dark ... yet this light will persevere and it will brighten up the darkness.”
Morris pointed out that India traditionally has been among the most hospitable places in the world for Jews and that the attacks haven't led to a mass migration of them out of the country. In fact, Morris said he plans to check into the Taj Mahal hotel -- which reopened Sunday -- the next time he's in Mumbai and that his family has been considering a move to India's financial capital.
Morris said he wouldn't want to give the terrorists the satisfaction of thinking they had changed anyone's mind about wanting to live or work in Mumbai.
”They have the worst traffic in the world, but Indians are incredibly nice people,” he said.
Morris knew Rabbi Holtzberg and spoke highly of his efforts to help Jews in India. But he said it is important to remember that, although Jews were apparently targeted, scores of other people from all walks of life died in the coordinated attack, which targeted 10 sites and lasted about 60 hours.
”More Muslims died in the attack than Jews,” Morris said.
Some of the terrorists - who went on a three-day rampage of killing that led to more than 170 deaths around Mumbai - had already checked into the hotel when Morris, a South African resident and cousin of local businessmen Mark and Len Wolman, left to take a flight home. He had been in India for two weeks on business for his company, Discovery Insurance.
”It was very much like 9/11,” he said. “This was a terrible attack on our world, against a functioning democracy that subscribes to all our beliefs.”
Morris is visiting the Wolmans this week, and attended the annual lighting of a large menorah on the first day of Hanukkah at the Holiday Inn in New London.
The wind played tricks during the ceremony, but finally Rabbi Avrohom Sternberg of Chabad of Eastern Connecticut was able to light the 15-foot-tall, 2,500-pound symbol of the Jewish holiday season.
The ceremony, said Rabbi Sternberg, was dedicated to the people who died in the attacks -- including six Jews, most prominently Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg and his wife, Rivkah Holtzberg, the directors of the Mumbai Jewish center called Chabad-Lubavitch.
”Everything that comes with a difficulty comes with a strong purpose,” said Rabbi Sternberg during the lighting ceremony. “It is cold outside tonight and it is dark ... yet this light will persevere and it will brighten up the darkness.”
Morris pointed out that India traditionally has been among the most hospitable places in the world for Jews and that the attacks haven't led to a mass migration of them out of the country. In fact, Morris said he plans to check into the Taj Mahal hotel -- which reopened Sunday -- the next time he's in Mumbai and that his family has been considering a move to India's financial capital.
Morris said he wouldn't want to give the terrorists the satisfaction of thinking they had changed anyone's mind about wanting to live or work in Mumbai.
”They have the worst traffic in the world, but Indians are incredibly nice people,” he said.
Morris knew Rabbi Holtzberg and spoke highly of his efforts to help Jews in India. But he said it is important to remember that, although Jews were apparently targeted, scores of other people from all walks of life died in the coordinated attack, which targeted 10 sites and lasted about 60 hours.
”More Muslims died in the attack than Jews,” Morris said.
Wednesday, December 17, 2008
Moshe Smiled..
Moshe smiles.. Feels so much better..
I was waiting for this.. Moshe… Keep smiling all your life..
May god compensate you million times more than he has taken away from you..
I was waiting for this.. Moshe… Keep smiling all your life..
May god compensate you million times more than he has taken away from you..
Monday, December 15, 2008
Rebuilding Nariman house for Moshe
Shai Venkatraman
Saturday, December 13, 2008 8:31 PM (Mumbai)
One of the main targets of 26/11 attack in Mumbai was Nariman house. It is a study centre and a home away from home for many Jews. It was totally destroyed but now the local Jewish community is determined to rebuild it.
A slow rebuilding has begun in Chabad House, better known by its older name, Nariman House. It was Rabbi Gabriel and wife Rivka's home and community centre, they had lovingly built over five years. (Watch)
The house was named after the ultra orthodox Chabad Lubavitch movement. Complete with a synagogue and a kosher kitchen under them, this had become a spiritual oasis not just for traveling backpackers and visiting businessmen, but also the local Jewish community.
"The Rabbi and his wife were really very nice. They were always looking after the guests who would drop in such large groups. Very warm," said Bensione, Bene Israeli.
The community is determined to rebuild the centre at the earliest and it's not just literally in bricks and wood. They want it to be a home, Moshe can return to.
In less than a year's time, little Moshe will be seen again here in the bylanes of Nariman House. This time with his mother Rivka's parents, who will take over as the new Rabbi. A powerful message to the local Jewish community many of whom have contemplated leaving the country after the attacks.
"Moshe did not know his grandparents because he lived here. They want to make Sandra and Moshe relax. Until that happens they will stay there. After that they will come back with Moshe," said Levi Jurkowicz, helper, Chabad House.
However, this plan is making local residents uneasy.
"If they stay here, it is a problem for us. What if they get attacked again? We will get affected," said a local.
"They could be attacked again. They should seal the building and break it. That's best for us and best for Colaba," said another local.
But Nariman House is part of a larger rebuilding in the city--a city, gathering itself, piece by piece.
Saturday, December 13, 2008 8:31 PM (Mumbai)
One of the main targets of 26/11 attack in Mumbai was Nariman house. It is a study centre and a home away from home for many Jews. It was totally destroyed but now the local Jewish community is determined to rebuild it.
A slow rebuilding has begun in Chabad House, better known by its older name, Nariman House. It was Rabbi Gabriel and wife Rivka's home and community centre, they had lovingly built over five years. (Watch)
The house was named after the ultra orthodox Chabad Lubavitch movement. Complete with a synagogue and a kosher kitchen under them, this had become a spiritual oasis not just for traveling backpackers and visiting businessmen, but also the local Jewish community.
"The Rabbi and his wife were really very nice. They were always looking after the guests who would drop in such large groups. Very warm," said Bensione, Bene Israeli.
The community is determined to rebuild the centre at the earliest and it's not just literally in bricks and wood. They want it to be a home, Moshe can return to.
In less than a year's time, little Moshe will be seen again here in the bylanes of Nariman House. This time with his mother Rivka's parents, who will take over as the new Rabbi. A powerful message to the local Jewish community many of whom have contemplated leaving the country after the attacks.
"Moshe did not know his grandparents because he lived here. They want to make Sandra and Moshe relax. Until that happens they will stay there. After that they will come back with Moshe," said Levi Jurkowicz, helper, Chabad House.
However, this plan is making local residents uneasy.
"If they stay here, it is a problem for us. What if they get attacked again? We will get affected," said a local.
"They could be attacked again. They should seal the building and break it. That's best for us and best for Colaba," said another local.
But Nariman House is part of a larger rebuilding in the city--a city, gathering itself, piece by piece.
`Insensitive' govt continues to ignore Jewish deaths in Mumbai
15 Dec 2008
NEW DELHI: Two-year-old Moshe Holtzberg tugs at your heartstrings, crying for his mother who was brutally killed by Pakistani terrorists at Nariman House in Mumbai during the three-day terror attacks. In many ways, Moshe is the face of the trauma that wracked the city.
Moshe's Israeli parents, Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg, 29, and his pregnant wife, Rivkah, 28, were killed along with other hostages. His story of being whisked away from his dead parents, soaked in blood, by his nanny has brought tears to most hardened hearts all over the world.
The Indian government, however, has remained completely immune to all this. In a display of crass insensitivity as well as an enduring sign that the government continues to pander to the politics of the Muslim-Jew divide, minister of state for external affairs E Ahamed did not mention the Nariman House attack in his statement to the UN Security Council last week. And this from an India which officially maintains that terror has no religion and all victims are equal.
In his speech to the UNSC asking for the world to ban the Jamaat-ud-Dawa, Ahamed referred to "pre-selected targets which included a cafe popular with Indian and foreign tourists and two major hotels". There was no mention of the Jewish Chabad Lubavitch centre, which was specifically chosen by the terrorists to attack Jews.
The Nariman House siege was even more horrific as it was the only one where the entire world was witness to NSG commandos rappelling down from a helicopter and blowing up the building with grenades after a 56-hour battle. It was also the only place where another Jewish leader from New York actually conducted a conversation with one of the terrorists.
While there is no official reason for this omission, sources said it was "inadvertent".
In the aftermath of the attacks, India showed a lot of insensitivity, this was just one more of them. For instance, the Maharashtra government sent official letters of condolence to the families of victims. Singapore found that the name of its lone victim was misspelt badly. The letter had to be returned to get the name right. In Delhi, the Malaysian high commission found that it had not been invited to the government's condolence briefing because its citizen who died in the attacks was of Indian origin, so the government thought he was Indian!
But was Ahamed's omission of the Jewish house in his speech a function of the utterly improbable relationship that India enjoys with Israel or was it a function of the fact that the government didn't want to "anger" Muslims by sympathising with the Jews. Sources said it could be both.
India's relationship with Israel resembles an irresistible, clandestine affair -- where the linkages are growing in many spheres but all below the radar. So, while the government is perfectly happy to have a huge defence relationship with Israel and an intelligence synergy that is seemingly bottomless, a strong fear of angering the Muslim keeps it from acknowledging this relationship openly.
Little Moshe did not even comprehend the nature of his parents' deaths. But for those who hoped for a word of sympathy for an orphaned child, the Indian government has decided not to oblige.
NEW DELHI: Two-year-old Moshe Holtzberg tugs at your heartstrings, crying for his mother who was brutally killed by Pakistani terrorists at Nariman House in Mumbai during the three-day terror attacks. In many ways, Moshe is the face of the trauma that wracked the city.
Moshe's Israeli parents, Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg, 29, and his pregnant wife, Rivkah, 28, were killed along with other hostages. His story of being whisked away from his dead parents, soaked in blood, by his nanny has brought tears to most hardened hearts all over the world.
The Indian government, however, has remained completely immune to all this. In a display of crass insensitivity as well as an enduring sign that the government continues to pander to the politics of the Muslim-Jew divide, minister of state for external affairs E Ahamed did not mention the Nariman House attack in his statement to the UN Security Council last week. And this from an India which officially maintains that terror has no religion and all victims are equal.
In his speech to the UNSC asking for the world to ban the Jamaat-ud-Dawa, Ahamed referred to "pre-selected targets which included a cafe popular with Indian and foreign tourists and two major hotels". There was no mention of the Jewish Chabad Lubavitch centre, which was specifically chosen by the terrorists to attack Jews.
The Nariman House siege was even more horrific as it was the only one where the entire world was witness to NSG commandos rappelling down from a helicopter and blowing up the building with grenades after a 56-hour battle. It was also the only place where another Jewish leader from New York actually conducted a conversation with one of the terrorists.
While there is no official reason for this omission, sources said it was "inadvertent".
In the aftermath of the attacks, India showed a lot of insensitivity, this was just one more of them. For instance, the Maharashtra government sent official letters of condolence to the families of victims. Singapore found that the name of its lone victim was misspelt badly. The letter had to be returned to get the name right. In Delhi, the Malaysian high commission found that it had not been invited to the government's condolence briefing because its citizen who died in the attacks was of Indian origin, so the government thought he was Indian!
But was Ahamed's omission of the Jewish house in his speech a function of the utterly improbable relationship that India enjoys with Israel or was it a function of the fact that the government didn't want to "anger" Muslims by sympathising with the Jews. Sources said it could be both.
India's relationship with Israel resembles an irresistible, clandestine affair -- where the linkages are growing in many spheres but all below the radar. So, while the government is perfectly happy to have a huge defence relationship with Israel and an intelligence synergy that is seemingly bottomless, a strong fear of angering the Muslim keeps it from acknowledging this relationship openly.
Little Moshe did not even comprehend the nature of his parents' deaths. But for those who hoped for a word of sympathy for an orphaned child, the Indian government has decided not to oblige.
Friday, December 12, 2008
N.Y. fifth graders thank Indian nanny for saving 2-year-old Moshe from Mumbai terrorists
"Dear Sandra, Thank you for saving Moshe," wrote Daniel Smith, a fifth-grader at Solomon Schecter Day School of Nassau County, to express his appreciation to the Indian nanny who saved two-year-old Moshe Holtzberg from the terrorist attack on the Chabad House in Mumbai, India two weeks ago.
The boy's parents, Rabbi Gavriel and Rivka Holtzberg, were both killed in the attack.
Smith's fifth-grade classmates wrote individual letters to the nanny, Sandra Samuel, which were presented to the Israeli Consulate in New York for delivery to Israel.
Smith was joined at the Consulate by his fifth grade classmate, Jennifer Lipman, their principal, Dr. Cindy Dolgin, and their Judaic Studies teacher, Lizet Romano, who initiated the project. The two represented the entire fifth grade in delivering the letters that recognized Samuel for her heroic act based on the Jewish tradition that "One who saves one person saves an entire nation."
In their letters, the students thanked Samuels for her bravery and assured her that her good deed did not go unnoticed in their community. Lipman wrote, "Everyone at my school thinks you are a hero. Thank you for all you've done."
Administrators felt there was a valuable pedagogical reason for this exercise. Dolgin commented, "What could our young students do under such terrifying circumstances taking place half a world away? As a class, the children and their teacher decided to write letters to Sandra Samuel to express their gratitude, their amazement and their awe for her bravery and courage in rescuing little Moshe, not unlike the rescue of another baby Moshe they had learned about in the Book of Exodus."
In addressing the students, David Saranga, Consul for Media and Public Affairs applauded the students' desire to express their thanks. ?The right way to transmit our thanks as the State of Israel is to welcome her into our community, as we have done. Samuel did the right thing by saving Moshe. She demonstrated that human life is valuable regardless of religion or ethnicity."
The students' letters have been passed for delivery to Chabad in Israel. Rabbi Shmuel Butman, Director of Lubavitch Youth Organization, noted, "Moishi was calling 'Mommy, mommy.' Sandra heard Moishi's cry and she brought him to safety totally sacrificing her own safety. She will be eternally remembered for her selflessness and heroism."
The Solomon Schechter Day School of Nassau County, located in Jericho, NY, is a Jewish Day Elementary School affiliated with the Conservative Movement and provides a dual curriculum in Judaic and secular education. The school also has a wide-ranging Israel studies program that stresses appreciation for Israel as a democratic and multicultural society.
The Consulate has prepared a short video of the event highlights, which can be viewed online at www.israelpolitik.org.
The boy's parents, Rabbi Gavriel and Rivka Holtzberg, were both killed in the attack.
Smith's fifth-grade classmates wrote individual letters to the nanny, Sandra Samuel, which were presented to the Israeli Consulate in New York for delivery to Israel.
Smith was joined at the Consulate by his fifth grade classmate, Jennifer Lipman, their principal, Dr. Cindy Dolgin, and their Judaic Studies teacher, Lizet Romano, who initiated the project. The two represented the entire fifth grade in delivering the letters that recognized Samuel for her heroic act based on the Jewish tradition that "One who saves one person saves an entire nation."
In their letters, the students thanked Samuels for her bravery and assured her that her good deed did not go unnoticed in their community. Lipman wrote, "Everyone at my school thinks you are a hero. Thank you for all you've done."
Administrators felt there was a valuable pedagogical reason for this exercise. Dolgin commented, "What could our young students do under such terrifying circumstances taking place half a world away? As a class, the children and their teacher decided to write letters to Sandra Samuel to express their gratitude, their amazement and their awe for her bravery and courage in rescuing little Moshe, not unlike the rescue of another baby Moshe they had learned about in the Book of Exodus."
In addressing the students, David Saranga, Consul for Media and Public Affairs applauded the students' desire to express their thanks. ?The right way to transmit our thanks as the State of Israel is to welcome her into our community, as we have done. Samuel did the right thing by saving Moshe. She demonstrated that human life is valuable regardless of religion or ethnicity."
The students' letters have been passed for delivery to Chabad in Israel. Rabbi Shmuel Butman, Director of Lubavitch Youth Organization, noted, "Moishi was calling 'Mommy, mommy.' Sandra heard Moishi's cry and she brought him to safety totally sacrificing her own safety. She will be eternally remembered for her selflessness and heroism."
The Solomon Schechter Day School of Nassau County, located in Jericho, NY, is a Jewish Day Elementary School affiliated with the Conservative Movement and provides a dual curriculum in Judaic and secular education. The school also has a wide-ranging Israel studies program that stresses appreciation for Israel as a democratic and multicultural society.
The Consulate has prepared a short video of the event highlights, which can be viewed online at www.israelpolitik.org.
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.
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