NYC man recalls phone ordeal with Mumbai attacker

NEW YORK (AP) — The gunman on the phone in Mumbai said his name was Imran, he wouldn't put the hostages on the phone and besides, they were fine — they hadn't even been slapped around.

No one at Chabad House wanted food, he claimed, his calm demeanor finally breaking into some irritation. "We haven't come here to eat and drink," he said.

On the other end of the phone, a New York City professor forced himself to keep his focus as he spent hours on the phone as a translator for Orthodox Jewish officials trying to talk to one of the attackers who had taken over their religious headquarters in India's financial capital.

"At the beginning, I didn't know what to be thinking, I didn't know what would happen," Pace University finance professor P. V. Viswanath told The Associated Press on Monday. "I had a lot of trepidation when I got on the call."

Viswanath, who grew up in Mumbai and is an Orthodox Jew, was in his office preparing his class lessons when he got word last month that gunmen had attacked a number of sites in Mumbai. He heard Chabad-Lubavitch officials were looking for help because one of the attackers at Chabad House was answering Rabbi Gavriel Noach Holtzberg's cell phone but would only speak in Urdu.

Viswanath, who counts Urdu among the numerous languages he speaks, offered his assistance. He had visited Chabad Houses around the world and had even been to the one in Mumbai and shared a meal with Holtzberg. He was connected to Rabbi Levi Shemtov, director of the Washington office of American Friends of Lubavitch. Shemtov set up conference calls between Washington and New York and Holtzberg's cell phone in Mumbai.

Shemtov described the man on the phone as "hauntingly calm." Viswanath said he didn't hear any of the vitriol that he might have expected.

"They had clearly attacked a Jewish center so presumably they were anti-Jewish, anti-Israel, I would not have been surprised if the voice sounded angry, sad, filled with hate, making statements about what Jews might or might not have done to Muslims," he said. "He didn't say anything about Israel or make any anti-Semitic comments."

In fact, Viswanath said, the man didn't say much of anything, refusing to say how many people were in the building. In successive conversations, they repeatedly asked about Holtzberg and the others in Chabad House and were told they were fine. When they asked Imran what he wanted, he said he wanted to speak to someone from the Indian government.

Viswanath said Chabad-Lubavitch officials finally got someone but couldn't get through to the attacker because of technical problems. At another point, Imran asked for someone who had been taken into custody in Mumbai to be brought to him, but that didn't go anywhere either.

Then, finally, just after 5 a.m., the man said the phone battery was weak and hung up, according to Shemtov. "The next time we tried to reach him, we couldn't reach him anymore," the rabbi said.

Viswanath remained waiting on the phone for several hours. It was only later that he found out Holtzberg and his wife were among the 171 killed in the attacks.

Looking back, he doesn't know that any amount of conversation would have changed the outcome, given that the calm and collected voice on the other end didn't change.

"He was going to do whatever he was going to do, or had already done," Viswanath said. "So if the plan was to kill everybody, that was what he was going to do. Our talking to him I don't think would have changed events in any way."

Chabad reached terrorist when they phoned Rabbi Holtzberg

I spent this morning at a memorial service in Westwood for Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg and his wife, Rivkah, who ran the Chabad in Mumbai and were killed in the terrorist attacks there last week. It was amazing to see more than 1,000 people, including some of Los Angeles’ top officials paying tribute to two Jews they’d never met before.

I spoke with a Chabad rabbi who went to school with Gavriel back in New York and with a scholar who had celebrated Shabbat at the Mumbai Chabad house the Friday before the attacks, but most the people there were simply grabbed by the power of the Holtzbergs’ story, by the personal mission that caused the young couple to relocate after marrying in 2003 to a foreign land—to, as one speaker said, “the spread of good and the destruction of evil.“

Despite the circumstances, the mood at the memorial was upbeat. And I was surprised to hear so many times the exhortation that Jewish men put on tefillin to honor Gavriel’s legacy and that they create a kosher house for Rivkah. I’m still amazed with how Rabbi Holtzberg and his rebbetzin have come to serve as the public faces of this tragedy. From everything I’ve heard about the couple, I think they’d be a bit embarrassed by all the attention. But so many Jews, and non-Jews too, felt like the attacks were an attack on them personally; when one suffers, we all suffer.

“All of the Jewish people are connected. They are part of us,“ Marilyn Greenberg, 71 and of no relation, told me at the service. “A young family, doing work for Klal Yisroel—and they were killed because they were Jewish. There wasn’t any other reason.“I have yet to find a clear report that the Jewish center was specifically targeted. But a man who had visited told me it was located down an alley, well off the street, and wouldn’t be the kind of boarding house you would just stumble upon while looking for hostages. And it’s not hard to imagine religious extremists including a small community of Jews in such a diabolical plot. I hear that’s been happening for centuries.

I’ll be writing more about this for this week’s Jewish Journal. The latest detail to emerge is this:

Chabad Rabbi Levi Shem Tov said he tried to phone Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg at the Chabad House in Mumbai during the terrorist attack that ended his life and that of his wife and four others Jews in the building. A terrorist, who indentified himself as Imram, answered the phone, and Rabbi Shem Tov heard Rivka Holtzberg screaming in English, “Please help immediately.“

The terrorist originally ended the first phone conversation, saying that he spoke only the Urdu language. Rabbi Shem Tov found an Urdu speaker and called again. The terrorist said the rabbi was alive and well and would be freed if demands were met.

Rabbi Shem Tov related that he told the terrorist he would contact the Indian government to give them what they wanted, but when the rabbi asked to speak with Rabbi Holtzberg, the terrorist replied, “You have already asked for too much.“

After another two or three phone calls, “Imram” said the phone was dying and he hung up.

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