“Chabad Mumbai Hasn’t Moved”

By COLlive reporter

Recent reports about the Chabad House in Mumbai moving because of new terror threats in India are being called “misleading” and “harmful,” COLlive.com was told.

An article by Indian Television NDTV and the Reuters news agency said “the Jewish center at the Nariman House, one of the targets of the brazen onslaught, has quietly shifted to a “new location” in the city.”

But the two Lubavitch bochurim running the Chabad House said the Chabad House has been stationed in the same location since moving from the Nariman House, where Rabbi Gabi and Rivky Holtzberg and other Jews were murdered.

In its current location, Chabad of Mumbai is well guarded and secured, offering Jewish services, Kosher meals and tourist information for businessmen, tourists and Israeli backpackers, Yossi Cohen said in a phone conversation.

“There is no present threat and these articles just cause problems – they make parents worried for nothing,” he said.

Some renovation of Nariman House, its walls shattered and pockmarked with bullets and grenade splinters, was undertaken about a week before the first anniversary of the terror attacks last year but later it was abandoned, it has been reported.

“Authorities are yet to make a decision on whether to rebuild Nariman House or shift it permanently to the other place,” Cohen, who was sent there with Levi Rabin by Merkos L’inyonei Chinuch, was quoted as saying.

He told COLlive that before Pesach they hung an 8 foot banner in English and Hebrew on the five-storey Nariman House, “We have temporarily shifted to a new location.”

“The reporter must have been fishing for a story, so they made it look like we recently moved again,” the British-born Cohen said.

The exact premises of Chabad of Mumbai is not publicized, but visitors can call their phone number and be invited “after a thorough screening.”