Chabad mourns its loss
Leaders in Brooklyn and Westwood are stunned at the deaths of a young rabbi and his wife in the terrorist attack on their Chabad center in Mumbai.
Reporting from Los Angeles and New York — Groups of bearded men in black blazers and wide-brimmed hats prayed aloud and chanted inside the Chabad-Lubavitch headquarters in Brooklyn on Friday, grieving the loss of friends killed in the terrorist siege in India this week.
Many had not slept in two days. They had been frantically e-mailing and calling contacts around the world, searching for any word on the people being held hostage in an ultra-Orthodox Jewish center during the terrorist attacks in Mumbai.
When news finally came, it reduced the religious leaders in this close-knit community to tears: Rabbi Gavriel Noach Holtzberg, 29, and his wife, Rivkah, 28, formerly of the Crown Heights section of New York, were killed, along with three other hostages.
The couple's son Moshe, who turns 2 today, was "heroically rescued" by a staff worker before Indian commandos stormed the building, said Rabbi Yehuda Krinsky of the Brooklyn Chabad. He said the boy is with family. A second son, who had been sick, was with relatives, Krinsky said.
The Holtzbergs had moved to Mumbai in 2003 to open the religious center for Chabad Lubavitch, a growing Hasidic branch of Judaism that emphasizes outreach to Jews.
"Chabad" is a Hebrew acronym for wisdom, understanding and knowledge. The organization originated in the late 18th century in the Russian city of Lubavitch. In 1940, the movement's leaders fled Nazism, and moved Chabad's headquarters to Crown Heights.
About 4,000 Chabad Lubavitch rabbis and their families serve lifetime assignments in 70 countries, double the number of emissaries from a decade ago. Many are stationed in Brooklyn as they await assignments around the world.
Amid the wave of attacks that targeted Americans, Britons and Jews in Mumbai, the Chabad Lubavitch center there was taken over late Wednesday, and the Holtzbergs were among the hostages. Indian commandos stormed the building Friday morning and found the bodies of five people, including Gavriel and Rivkah Holtzberg.
In Los Angeles
At Chabad's West Coast headquarters in Los Angeles, a neo-Gothic brick building that was the first Chabad House in the world, Rabbi Chaim Cunin leaned against a table, biting his lip and staring through red-rimmed eyes.
