It was November 29, 2008, and Moishe Holtzberg was wandering around crying in a house filled with blood when his nanny, Sandra quickly grabbed him and waited for her chance to race away from the butchers with the only living Jew left in Mumbai’s Nariman House.
Young Moishe and his beloved Sandra were brought to Israel by his grandparents after the death of his parents, Rabbi Gavriel and Rivka Holtzberg, the co-directors of the Chabad House in Mumbai. The couple were murdered by operatives from the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba terrorist organization, along with four other Jewish guests who were at Nariman House at the time of the attack.
More than 160 other victims were murdered in the city in that four-day killing spree by a 10-man terrorist cell from Lashkar-e-Taiba, as well as more than 300 others who were wounded.
Moishe, who is not yet bar mitzvah, is growing up with the knowledge that should he so choose, he has the right to take up his parents’ career and continue their life’s work as a Chabad-Lubavitch emissary in Mumbai.
This summer, Moishe joined Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in a meeting with India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi during the latter’s visit to the Jewish State. The Indian leader invited his Israeli counterpart to come to India for a reciprocal visit, and to bring Moishe along with him.
Prime Minister Netanyahu accepted the invitation, and agreed to bring Moishe along. In the coming year, the two will travel together to India to visit Prime Minister Modi — and to pay their respects at the site where Moishe’s parents lost their lives, and where an Indian nanny miraculously managed to save Moishe’s.