Moshe Holtzberg: Child of All Israel

This is Moshe Holtzberg, with his attendant, at a commemoration ceremony for his parents, Gavriel and Rivka Holtzberg, Mumbai December 1, 2008.

Sheera Frenkel, at the Times of London, writes of Moshe and the life of his parents, "You Are a Child of Israel, Orphaned Two-Year-Old Moshe Holtzberg is Told":

Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg was dressed for prayer the moment he was shot, next to a book on terrorism on his bedside table. As Israel mourned the murdered rabbi, his pregnant wife and four other Jews yesterday, a family friend described how he found the bodies amid the carnage of Mumbai.

“I think he was sending us a message. He showed his tremendous dedication to faith, even in his final moments,” Rabbi Dov Goldberg, who was the first civilian to enter the Chabad centre in Mumbai after its two-day siege, told The Times.

Thousands of Orthodox mourners prayed and wept before the shrouded bodies of Mumbai’s six Jewish victims at a ceremony broadcast live on television and attended by Israeli leaders, including President Peres.

Moshe, the Holtzbergs’ two-year-old son, was not at the procession held at Kfar Chabad, the movement’s headquarters in Israel. Rabbi Goldberg said that the boy was “not in good shape” and had not slept for four days. The child escaped from the gunmen with his Indian nanny when the terrorists burst into Mumbai’s Chabad compound ....

Rabbi Goldberg revealed that the couple knew their killers. Some of the terrorists had visited the centre on a reconnaissance mission before the attack, and had been given a meal by Rivka Holtzberg, the murdered Rabbi’s 28-year old wife.

Rabbi Goldberg, a friend of the Holtzbergs from school, said that he had no doubt the items left behind by the rabbi were a message to his survivors. “I was called in to identify his body,” he said. “I looked at him and understood that I was the one who would need to make sure that the Chabad lives on; that I would be called on to do this.”

The murdered rabbi’s body was wrapped in tefillin, a prayer aid containing Hebrew scrolls. “I recognised the tefillin on him as his own. I know it was him who must have put the tefillin on himself, even while there were terrorists in his home.”

There's more here, but the conclusion shows the power of life and faith in this family:

The parents of Rivka Holtzberg have suggested that they will return to Mumbai to complete their daughter’s work and raise Moshe in his parents’ former home. Giving a eulogy at the ceremony, Moshe Kotlarsky, a Chabad Rabbi from New York, aimed his message at Moshe, saying: “You don’t have a mother who will hug you. You are the child of all of Israel.”