After a decade, 26/11 survivor Moshe returns to Mumbai
new delhi — Moshe Holtzberg, a young boy whose parents were killed at a Jewish centre in Mumbai during the November 26, 2008 terror attack, returned to that city for the first time on Tuesday to visit the site of the attack with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Netanyahu arrived in New Delhi for a six-day visit on Sunday and will travel to Mumbai on Thursday where he will visit the Chabad Center where Holtzberg’s parents Rabbi Gabriel Noach Holtzberg and his wife Rivkah were gunned down as ten militants rampaged through Mumbai in a 3-day siege. Netanyahu will unveil a memorial to 166 people killed in the attacks.
Moshe was 2 at the time of the attack and was carried to safety by his nanny who found him by his parents’ bodies. Holtzberg’s parents were emissaries of the Chabad movement living in Mumbai at the time.
“We are very excited for the upcoming visit of Baby Moshe, who is not anymore a baby. But he will always remain in our heart as baby Moshe,” Rabbi Israel Kozlovsky, the head of the Chabad Trust in India told reporters on Monday.
He’s coming back to “the very place where his life was miraculously saved by his Indian nanny.”
Sandra Samuels, Moshe’s nanny travelled to Israel with him after his parents were killed and was given Israeli citizenship in 2010. On Tuesday she accompanied the boy and his relatives as they arrived in Mumbai. Netanyahu will unveil a memorial in Chabad House to remember all the victims of the Mumbai attack, no matter their religion or where they were killed, Kozlovsky said, but there will be a special memorial to Moshe’s parents, “who dedicated their lives to establish this center and they have run it until the last breath of their life.” —