India’s Shliach Retells Horror

By Binyomin Weiss, COLlive reporter

Two senior Chabad-Lubavitch rabbis paid a visit this week to the mourning Teitelbaum family in Jerusalem’s Mea She’arim neighborhood.

R’ Aryeh Leibish Teitelbaum, 37, was murdered by terrorists while studying in the Chabad House in Mumbai, shortly after finishing his prayers. Teitelbaum was in Mumbai last week to help supervise a mushroom-processing plant doing a production run for a US kosher food manufacturer.

The American-born father of eight was the son-in-law of the leader of the Toldot Avraham Yitzhak hassidic sect, and was related to the leaders of the Satmar hassidim, the Jerusalem Post reported.

Teitelbaum frequently traveled abroad as part of his job as a kashrut inspector, often at the behest of his father, the Volover Rebbe, Rabbi Nahum Ephraim Teitelbaum, a veteran kashrut certifier based in New York.

“The bullets found him after prayer, while studying inside the Chabad House synagogue,” Poppenheim said. “He died there sanctifying God’s name.”

Rabbis Groner and Krinsky were in Israel for the funeral of Rabbi Gavriel and Rivka Holtzberg HY”D, the Chabad Shluchim couple who directed the Chabad House.

“Chabad’s work with the assimilated is well known,” Teitelbaum’s grieving father told the two rabbis in yiddish. “What is now known is the help you give to the religious people who travel in the world and you are their only home.”

Also present at the Shiv’ah was Rabbi Dovber Goldberg, a fellow Shliach in India who, upon hearing about the terror attack last week, quickly traveled to Mumbai.

He retold the Teitebaum family of what he saw and heard (COLlive was asked not to print what was said). This past Shabbos Goldberg already organized Shabbos prayers and meals for Jewish visitors and the Israeli rescue team.