Moshe: With grandparents

Mumbai, Nov. 29 (Reuters): His face framed by golden curls, tiny Moshe Holtzberg is the centre of attention for the city’s small Jewish community as it mourns the loss of the boy’s rabbi father and mother, both killed by terrorists in Nariman House.

The orphaned Moshe, who turned two today, is now in the care of his mother’s parents after his nanny miraculously rushed him to safety while militants roamed the Jewish centre where the family lived and worked.

“When the baby emerged with the nanny, he had bloodstains on him,” Benjamin Isaac, secretary of the Indian Jewish Federation, said. “Thankfully it wasn’t his blood. But we knew someone’s blood had already been spilled.”

On Wednesday, two terrorists had stormed the building that housed the Chabad centre in Colaba. They took eight persons, including Israeli-born Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg, 29, his wife and child, hostage.

Moshe’s nanny, Sandra Samuel, who was on the first floor when the gunmen arrived, locked herself in a room.

“The whole night I heard gunshots and loud blasts,” she told police. “Next morning, it was quiet for a while, when I heard the baby crying.”

Samuel went up to the second floor where she found Moshe crying next to four persons lying motionless on the ground. She picked him up and dashed out.

A handyman who worked for the family also escaped.

The standoff ended on Friday. But by then the militants had killed the remaining hostages, including Gavriel, 29, and his 28-year-old wife Rivka.

The Holtzbergs, who were married in Israel before moving to Mumbai in 2003 to run a synagogue and Torah classes as part of the worldwide Chabad-Lubavitch Movement, were no strangers to hardship, friends said. They had a child who died of a genetic illness, and another is seriously ill with the same ailment and is hospitalised in Israel.

At a police station yesterday, Moshe sat clutching a grimy doll surrounded by Jewish volunteers while Samuel described her ordeal. He has since been handed to his maternal grandparents, Shimon and Yehudit Rosenberg.

“The boy’s security is of utmost concern to us,” said Jonathan Solomon, a community leader. “He had been crying. He is too small and all this must be affecting him so much.”

Last call to NY

Minutes before terrorists took him and his wife hostage, Rabbi Gavriel made a last call to his headquarters of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement in New York, saying that the “situation was not good”. Seconds later, he was cut off.