Brooklyn Rabbi and Wife Caught in Attacks
By Fernanda Santos
NY Times | November 28, 2008, p. A18.
In 2003, barely out of their teens and newly married, Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg and his wife, Rivka, moved from Brooklyn to the coastal city of Mumbai, India, to manage a mix of educational center, synagogue and social hall known as a Chabad house, one of about 3,500 outposts around the world run by the Lubavitch Hasidic movement.
The place soon became a year-round magnet for Israeli backpackers and the Jewish businessmen and tourists who flock to Mumbai, as well as for the Iraqi and Indian Jews who live there. Mrs. Holtzberg served visitors coffee and homemade kosher delicacies. Rabbi Holtzberg always offered a helping hand to someone who was sick or stranded, often calling worried parents or spouses miles and miles away to calm them.
On Wednesday, the Holtzbergs’ Chabad house became an unlikely target of the terrorist gunmen who unleashed a series of bloody coordinated attacks at locations in and around Mumbai’s commercial center.
Firing grenades and automatic weapons, the men also took the Holtzbergs and at least six other people hostage in the Chabad house, according to friends of the Holtzbergs. The couple’s 2-year-old son, Moshe, and a cook managed to escape about 12 hours into the siege, the friends said. The boy’s pants were soaked in blood when he emerged. By late Thursday afternoon in New York, there was still no news of his parents’ fate.
It is not known if the Jewish center was strategically chosen, or if it was an accidental hostage scene. But if the center lacked the size and prominence of the attackers’ other targets, the news of its fate reverberated among Chabad houses in Australia, Argentina, Tunisia, Kazakhstan, Norway and 67 other countries.
But perhaps nowhere was it felt more strongly than in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, the nerve center of the Lubavitch community and the neighborhood where Rabbi Holtzberg grew up. At the group’s world headquarters on Eastern Parkway and Kingston Avenue, men filed into the synagogue all day to pray for the Holtzbergs’ safe release. In a separate room, women swayed on their knees as they read the Torah. In the offices upstairs, rabbis and friends of the couple manned telephones, staying in contact with a sizable network of volunteers at the house in Mumbai, waiting for news.
“We were up all night, trying to sort fact from fiction, figure out what their status is,” Rabbi Dovid Zaklikowski, 28, a friend of Rabbi Holtzberg since high school, said in an interview.
The Lubavitchers’ headquarters occupies a wide five-story building that is the tallest on the block. It is the site of an annual conference for the emissaries who run Chabad houses. This year’s conference ended last weekend, but many of the participants stayed behind to spend Thanksgiving with relatives in the area.
On Thursday, they found themselves drawn to the synagogue, even those who said they knew Rabbi Holtzberg only by name. Someone scribbled an English translation of the Hebrew sign affixed to the temple’s doors, bearing the couple’s names. The translation read, in part: “Think positive thoughts and good will come.”
“For our movement, this is a very somber day,” said Rabbi Sagee Harshefer, who heads the Chabad house in Ness Ziona, Israel, about 12 miles south of Tel Aviv. “But there is hope.”
Gavriel and Rivka Holtzberg were born in Israel, though he and his siblings were brought to Crown Heights as children by their parents. The couple married a year before they went to Mumbai, formerly Bombay, to fulfill a role that Rabbi Zaklikowski said fit perfectly with Rabbi Holtzberg’s personality.
“He has a huge heart, always willing to help somebody in need,” the rabbi said. “It’s only natural that he would give himself to the community.”
Rabbi Moshe Kotlarsky, who directed the Chabad emissaries’ conference, said of Rabbi Holtzberg, “He is a very dynamic, energetic individual” who turned Mumbai’s Chabad house into “a home away from home for thousands and thousands of Jews.”
At midafternoon in New York on Wednesday, the first reports of the attacks in Mumbai hit the news, but no one in the Crown Heights Lubavitch community knew exactly where they had occurred — and no one suspected that the Chabad house had been hit. Still, some friends wanted to make sure that Rabbi Holtzberg and his wife and son were all right, so they phoned. There was no answer.
Yacov Young, Rabbi Holtzberg’s cousin, said he had been at home in Crown Heights, celebrating the birth of his son and a brother-in-law’s marriage, when his phone rang about midnight.
“Our hearts sank when we heard the bad news,” Mr. Young said as he dashed into the synagogue.
Rabbi Holtzberg’s parents, Noah and Freida, spent most of Thursday holed up in their house in Crown Heights, but left for Israel late in the afternoon. Meanwhile, Rivka Holtzberg’s parents, Rabbi Shimon and Yehudit Rosenberg, who live in Israel, boarded a plane to Mumbai. They were accompanied by a crew from the Israeli relief organization ZAKA, said Dov Maisel, a medic with the group, by telephone from Israel.
“They are on a mission to get their grandson, but they are very, very nervous” about their daughter and son-in-law, Mr. Maisel said. “Some 24 hours have passed, and they have heard nothing.”
Liz Robbins contributed reporting.
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