Memories Of Attacks Shadow Mumbai's New Jewish Center

September 30, 2009

Author: Emily Wax

Source: The Washington Post

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/09/29/AR2009092903586.html

This is Mumbai's new Chabad House, a Jewish center that keeps its whereabouts private after attacks here in November that left more than 170 people dead, including a rabbi and his wife. The center's address is given out only to Jews looking for a place to observe Friday night Sabbaths, eat a kosher meal or show solidarity after what happened last year.

Of those killed in the three-day siege, security experts said, Rabbi Gavriel Noach Holtzberg, 29, and his wife, Rivkah, 28, were probably the only ones singled out for execution. The young emissaries from the orthodox Jewish Chabad-Lubavitch movement were tortured and killed inside the old Chabad House, also known as Nariman House, during the attacks. Their 2-year-old son, Moshe, was dramatically rescued by his Indian nanny.

As Mumbai mourned for those killed in the attacks, the rabbi's father, cradling his orphaned grandchild at a prayer service, vowed that the Chabad House would rise again in the same spot. But that was not to be.

Daily life in Mumbai returned to normal in the days after the attacks, in which 10 gunmen working in teams of two struck at 10 sites, but many Jews and Israelis in Mumbai -- and across India-- are scared.