Orphan of slain rabbi in Mumbai going to Israel

NEW YORK (AP) — Moshe Holtzberg, the 2-year-old orphan of the rabbi and his wife slain in the Mumbai Jewish center, will fly to Israel Monday on an Israeli Air Force jet with his parents' remains and the Indian woman who rescued him, an Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman said.

Spokesman Andy David said workers were collecting the body parts of victims killed by suspected Muslim militants in the Jewish center, three days after the commandos wrested control of the site from the gunmen.

Moshe was spirited out of the center on Thursday by Sandra Samuel, a nanny who worked there for years. She found him crying beside his parents' bodies, his pants drenched in blood.

His slain parents, Rabbi Gavriel Noach Holtzberg, 29, and Rivkah, 28, ran the headquarters of the ultra-Orthodox Chabad Lubavitch movement in Mumbai. Six civilians were killed in the center in the three-day terror siege that ended Saturday morning, David said Monday. In all, more than 170 died in attacks on 10 targets across the Indian city.

Robert Katz, the director of an Israeli orphanage who was close to the boy's family, said an Air Force jet left Israel Sunday night for India to bring back Moshe, Samuel and the remains of his parents and the others killed at the Chabad House. The plane is expected to leave India Monday and arrive later the same night, Katz said, speaking from New York.

All six of the civilian victims in the Chabad House were Jewish, and four were Israelis, Israel's Foreign Ministry said. They will be buried in Israel on Tuesday, Katz said.

Moshe will be accompanied on the trip to Israel by his maternal grandparents, Yehudit and Shimon Rosenberg, who were reunited with their grandson when they arrived in Mumbai on Friday. They came with a team of Israeli rescue workers who are working to collect all the body parts in accordance with Jewish law requiring that all parts of a body be buried together as a whole.

"It was pure raw emotion, tears of joy, tears of sorrow, incredible emotion, understandably out of control," Katz said of their reunion.

Asked about Moshe's condition, he said: "I don't know that he can comprehend or that he will remember seeing his parents shot in cold blood."

Moshe's father was a dual American-Israeli citizen and his mother was Israeli. The couple lived in Israel and Brooklyn before they moved to Mumbai in 2003.

The toddler has one older sibling who has Tay-Sachs, a genetic disorder particularly prevalent in Jews of Eastern European origin. He is permanently hospitalized in Israel, Katz said. The couple's first-born child died of Tay-Sachs.

Samuel, an Indian resident, will live with Moshe in Israel "so at least he has someone he knows and recognizes and loves," said Katz.

During the siege of the Jewish center, Samuel had locked herself in a laundry room when she heard Moshe's mother Rivkah screaming "Sandra help!" Then the screaming stopped, and it was quiet, Katz said.

She cracked open the door of her hiding place and saw a deserted staircase. She ran up one flight and saw the rabbi and his wife, covered in blood and shot to death. She snatched the crying boy, bolted down the stairs and out of the building.

"She's been there with him throughout," Katz said.

Though Samuel has no passport or papers, Moshe's grand-uncle, Rabbi Yitzchak David Grossman, helped arrange for her to get a visa to Israel. In a sad coincidence, Grossman is founder of the largest orphanage in Israel, Migdal Or.

"There are going to be thousands of people at this funeral," Katz said. "This couple wasn't living in the West Bank. They weren't settlers. They weren't occupying anyone's land. They were killed because they were Jews, simple and plain."

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