Orphan of slain rabbi in Mumbai heads to Israel

by Blue Crush | December 1, 2008 at 09:17 pm

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The cries of little Moshe Holtzberg wounded hearts Monday at a tearful memorial for his parents in Mumbai, India. "Ima, Ima, Ima!" he wailed, using the Hebrew word for mother, clutching a toy basketball while squirming in the arms of mourners at the Mumbai synagogue. The toddler and his Indian caretaker, Sandra Samuel, have now boarded a jet along with the bodies of his parents and four other Jews slain at the the Chabad House to fly to Israel - a place the curly haired 2 year old has never seen.

JERUSALEM - An Israeli Air Force jet left India for Israel today carrying the two-year-old orphan of a rabbi and his wife who were slain in the Mumbai Jewish centre attack, along with his parents' remains and the Indian woman who rescued him.

Moshe Holtzberg's slain parents, Rabbi Gavriel Noach Holtzberg, 29, and Rivka, 28, ran the headquarters of the ultra-Orthodox Chabad Lubavitch movement in Mumbai.

Moshe was spirited out of the centre 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.

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

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