By DPA and Haaretz
“They killed three people, not two,” said Rabbi Shimon Rosenberg, the father of Rivka Holtzberg, during her funeral, indicating that she had been pregnant, Army Radio reported Tuesday.
Rivka and her husband Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg were both killed during a terror attack at the Chabad house in Mumbai last week.
In his eulogy, Rosenberg revealed that his daughter had been five months pregnant, and promised the couple’s two-year-old son that the Mumbai Chabad center would be rebuilt soon.
Thousands of Israelis bade farewell Tuesday to six Jews killed in Mumbai’s terrorist attacks. The bodies of Gavriel and Rivka Holtzberg were taken in a funeral procession from Chabad Village, east of Tel Aviv, to Jerusalem’s Mount of Olives.
Four others were also buried in Jerusalem and near Tel Aviv.
An Israel Air Force plane had earlier carried the bodies, as well as the Holtzbergs’ surviving toddler, to Israel, landing at Ben Gurion International Airport near Tel Aviv late Monday.
A short ceremony including a Jewish prayer for the dead was held at the airport, before the bodies were transported to Israel’s Abu Kabir pathological center for final identification.
Rabbi Moshe Kotlarsky, a Chabad official from New York said the Jewish center in Mumbai’s Nariman House would be rebuilt and named after the Holtzbergs.
Turning to the couple’s two-year-old son Moishe, who survived the onslaught and was rescued by his Indian nanny, Kotlarsky said “Moishe, you have no mom and dad who will take you in their arms. You have no one to hold and kiss you. You will be the child of all of Israel.”
President Shimon Peres, who attended the service along with lawmakers, Israel’s chief rabbis and opposition leader Benjamin Netanyahu, urged the world to combat global terrorism.
Thousands of ultra-Orthodox Jews clad in black also packed Jerusalem’s religious Mea Shearim neighborhood to pay their respect to U.S. citizen Aryeh Leibish Teitelbaum, a kosher food supervisor in his late 30s who was in Nariman Chabad House at the time of the attack.
Three more funeral services were held in the towns of Bnei Brak and Petah Tikva, east of Tel Aviv, and at the Yarkon cemetery, north of the city to honor three other victims: 50-year-old Norma Shvarzblat Rabinovich of Mexico, who had planned to immigrate to Israel this week to join two of her children; Yocheved Orpaz, 60, who had been traveling in India with a daughter and grandchildren and Bentzion Chroman, 28, who like Teitelbaum, was a supervisor of kosher food.
At least 10 heavily armed men, who are believed to have reached Mumbai by a sea, attacked the city during three days of terror that ended Saturday, targeting two five-star hotels, a railway station, the Jewish center, a hospital and other targets. Some 170 people were killed and hundreds were wounded. Thirty foreigners were among the dead.
Untitled from COL.org.il on Vimeo.
You are the true lasting victims of this heinous atrocity,your children are in Gan Eden and though much has been written about their sweet little Moshe shy’ who while a victim no doubt, we know that you dear Rosenbergs and Holtzbergs,the same ones who raised his amazing parents will raise him in the same derech.I wish I had some magic words of condolence or comfort,but I know there are none.I do however wish to say,Thank-you.Thank you for bringing to this world two such tremendous examples to us all .Thank-you for raising them in a true spirit of Ahavas Chinam and… Read more »