kfar chabad, israel | Rabbis wept, women wailed and Chabad faithful called for avenging the tragedy in Mumbai with holiness and love as thousands gathered Dec. 2 for the funerals of the two Chabad emissaries killed in the Mumbai terrorist attacks.
The mourners came together under a sun-drenched Israeli sky in this Chabad-Lubavitch town near Tel Aviv. The bodies of Rabbi Gavriel and Rivkah Holtzberg were laid out side by side and wrapped in prayer shawls in front of a replica of the Brooklyn, N.Y., home of the late Lubavitcher rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson.
The rabbis eulogizing the couple said the tragedy of their being killed in the house in Mumbai in which they had welcomed so many should be met by even more outreach by Chabad emissaries.
“We need to have a revenge of light, an attack of holiness and love,” said Rabbi Naftali Liebsker, who helps coordinate Chabad’s emissaries worldwide. “Join us; that will be our answer.”
Mourners appeared particularly aggrieved by the couple’s now-orphaned son, 2-year-old Moshe, who was spirited out of the Mumbai Chabad House during the attack by his Indian nanny.
“The whole world and, of course, the Jewish people need an answer to the question asked by a 2-year-old child: ‘Where is my mother?'” President Shimon Peres said at the funeral.
For Israelis generally, the attacks in India thousands of miles away felt both painful and familiar, but the form of last week’s bloody attacks and the prolonged commando raid at the Mumbai Chabad House prompted Israelis to consider a new level of vulnerability.
Yarom Schweitzer, the director of the Counter-Terrorism Project at Tel Aviv University’s Institute for National Security Studies, said the Mumbai attack was being thoroughly scrutinized.
“No one is surprised that Jewish and Israeli sites are being targeted by global Mujahadeen, but the method of operation, including the massive manpower and firepower, are all being studied carefully to be ready for any surprise,” Schweitzer said. “Here they imported the battlefield into the city in a Babi Yar-style operation. They went in not planning for a hostage situation but pure killing en masse, and this is what should be acknowledged and prepared for.”
Six Jews (five if them Israeli) were killed in the attack on the five-story apartment building that housed the Chabad center in Mumbai. They reportedly were bound and executed, and there are varying reports on whether or not they were tortured before their deaths. Several were found in prayer shawls, possibly put on them by Gavriel Holtzberg before he was killed.
The footage of Moshe in the arms of his nanny, Sandra Samuel, played repeatedly on Israeli TV stations. As part of the drama, cameras followed Moshe’s maternal grandparents preparing to leave Israel for India, holding out hope that their daughter and son-in-law would still be alive. Instead they bid the couple final goodbyes at the funeral services at Kfar Chabad — literally “Chabad Village.”
Rivkah and Gavriel, who were both born in Israel but grew up in New York, decided shortly after getting married to become emissaries for the Lubavitch movement.
In a video of the couple taken about two years ago in their Mumbai home, they are seen beaming wide smiles. A shot of Rivkah shows her bringing out a tray of Chanukah sufganiot. Gavriel describes the special sense of mission he feels helping out Israelis in distress, particularly those he would visit who were imprisoned in India, usually on drug-related charges.
Yossi Katz, a geography professor at Bar-Ilan University, was with the couple on their last Shabbat. A frequent traveler and visitor to Chabad houses around the world, he said he had been especially taken by the warmth and enthusiasm of his young hosts.
Katz talked with the Holtzbergs about their sense of mission as Chabad emissaries.
“[Rivkah] said that being emissaries for them had become a way of life — not done in connection to something else, but their very lives, ” he said.
Norma Shvarzblat Rabinovich, 50, a Jewish woman from Mexico was killed during the attacks. She was buried Dec. 2 in Israel along with Yocheved Orpaz, 60. Two Israeli kashrut inspectors also were killed at the Chabad House: Aryeh Leibish Teitelbaum, 38, and Bentzion Chroman, 28. They reportedly had stopped by the Chabad House to pray before catching a flight to Israel.
Teitelbaum’s family, members of the non-Zionist Satmar Chassidic sect, caused some controversy in Israel when they requested that the Israeli flag not be draped on Teitelbaum’s coffin at a brief state ceremony at Ben Gurion Airport on Dec. 1, when the bodies arrived in Israel.
President Bush sent a letter of condolence (which was posted on the Chabad Web site) and a separate personal letter to the Holtzbergs’ parents. “Through countless acts of love and kindness, the lost members of the Chabad-Lubavitch community in Mumbai represented the best of the human spirit, and their memories will live on in the hearts and souls of those they touched,” Bush wrote in the letter he sent to Chabad-Lubavitch.
At the funerals Dec. 2, Lubavitch officials announced that renovations of the Chabad House in Mumbai would begin immediately and that the building would be dedicated anew, renamed for Gavriel and Rivkah Holtzberg.