On Wednesday evening, the elder Cunin spoke on the phone with Gavriel's father in Crown Heights, whom he grew up with, attending the same school. Cunin reminded Holtzberg of the Yiddish phrase Tracht gut vet zein gut -- "Think good and it will be good" -- trying to keep his friend's spirits up.
Gavriel had made his final call to the Israeli Consulate in Mumbai earlier that night. Holtzberg's final words were "Ze lo matzav tov," Hebrew for "This is not a good situation," before the line went dead. That story had circulated through Chabad headquarters in New York and to California, the younger Cunin said.
In Crown Heights, police officers patrolled the neighborhood surrounding the headquarters Friday, and New York Police Commissioner Ray Kelly paid a visit, offering his support. "When an act of terrorism happens halfway across the world, it has an impact on our community," Kelly said.
Residents walking along traffic-heavy Eastern Parkway, where the Chabad headquarters is located, stopped in the wind and chill to commiserate about the tragedy, as vendors sold bouquets of carnations on street corners. There are at least 30 synagogues in the neighborhood, and many residents had personal connections to the family.
"They were people who went to the corners of the world for outreach," said Zalman Zezmer, 24, a Brooklyn yeshiva student, who said he had worshiped with the couple. "For such a terrible thing to happen in their Chabad House, in the place they dedicated their lives to, it's very hard to accept."
Gavriel Holtzberg was born in Israel and moved with his family to Crown Heights when he was 9. He held dual citizenship, and studied at yeshivas in New York and Argentina, also serving as a rabbinical student in Thailand and China. Rivkah was born and raised in Israel before relocating to New York.
The couple met through a matchmaker, and they moved to Mumbai soon after their marriage to serve the region's small Jewish community of businesspeople, tourists and residents and help impoverished and drug-addicted people in the neighborhood. They raised money to purchase a five-story building, which became known as the Nariman House, in the tourist neighborhood of Colaba.
The couple ran the synagogue and Torah classes. Gavriel also conducted Jewish weddings, circumcisions and ritual slaughterings. Since kosher meat was not available in India, Gavriel, a kosher butcher, prepared the meat for himself and the rest of the Jewish community there, said his cousin, Rabbi Dovid Holtzberg, 32, of Monterey, Calif.
