Jews in Los Angeles on Sunday mourned a slain couple who had run a Mumbai Jewish center besieged by terrorists. As local leaders decried the attack in India, arrangements were underway to move the emissaries' 2-year-old son Moshe to Israel, where he will live with his maternal grandparents and the nanny who rescued him.
About 1,000 people attended a memorial at the West Coast headquarters of the ultra-Orthodox Chabad organization in Westwood, closing a stretch of Gayley Avenue as they paid tribute to Rabbi Gavriel Noach Holtzberg and his wife, Rivkah, and vowed to remain steadfast in the face of the attacks.
Rabbi Boruch Shlomo Cunin, executive director of West Coast Chabad Lubavitch, addressed his remarks directly to the terrorists, saying, "You thought you would do us in, but . . . we the Jewish people, we who believe in light . . . we shall continue."
To sustained applause, Marshall Grossman, the Chabad house chairman, said of the terrorists: "May they burn in hell."
Moshe's grandparents are affiliated with the world's largest Jewish orphanage, Migdal Ohr, which serves 6,500 orphaned and disadvantaged children in northern Israel, a spokesman said.
Sandra Samuel, the nanny who saved Moshe, has told reporters that she hid for 12 hours at one point last week when terrorists took over Mumbai's Chabad-Lubavitch Jewish center, which was run by Holtzberg, 29, and his wife, 28. The center served Mumbai's Jewish community and was a home away from home for traveling Jews.
Samuel, a resident of India, said she heard Moshe crying and found him standing next to his parents. His clothes were partly covered with blood. Samuel said Moshe's parents were lying on the floor and appeared to be unconscious. She scooped up the child and fled the building along with the center's caretaker.
"She basically dared the terrorists to shoot at her while carrying a baby," said Robert Katz, the orphanage spokesman.
Katz said he heard the story from Migdal Ohr's founder, Rabbi Yitzchak Dovid Grossman, who is also the baby's great-uncle by marriage. Rivkah Holtzberg's mother is the sister of Grossman's wife. Holtzberg's father runs an elementary school for girls at Migdal Ohr, Katz said.
Moshe marked his second birthday over the weekend with his maternal grandparents, who arrived in Mumbai during the siege.
Katz said the child, nanny and grandparents and the Holtzbergs' bodies were scheduled to leave India today.
