by Robert Wiener
NJJN Staff Writer

December 4, 2008

While the murders of a Chabad rabbi and his wife by terrorists in Mumbai, India, have shaken Jews around the world, many in the New Jersey Jewish community felt a personal connection to the atrocity.

The news was especially painful for people who had known Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg and his wife, Rivkah, who were among the nine found dead in the Chabad outreach center after the gunmen’s Nov. 26 assault on sites throughout India’s financial capital.

New Jersey has at least 85 centers associated with Chabad-Lubavitch, the hasidic movement known for its outreach work to Orthodox and non-Orthodox Jews alike.

Morristown is also home to the Rabbinical College of America, one of the main training sites for Chabad shluchim, or emissaries, who are often dispatched to far-flung locales to establish Chabad Houses. (See related stories)

Rabbi Mendel Bogomilsky, who directs the Chai Center — a synagogue and Judaica store in Millburn — described the couple as “true tzadikim,” or righteous people. They spent their days preparing and serving meals to Jews who were hungry, both for kosher food and for spiritual uplift, he said.

“He was a scholar,” said Bogomilsky. “He opened up the center in a corner of the business district near the hotels, and people came to him for kosher meals and prayer services. He would host people for Shabbos — Israeli backpackers traveling through or just tourists. He would slaughter chickens himself, and his wife would clean them and bake bread herself. If people missed meals at the Chabad house, she would send them over to their hotels. They went way above and beyond what anybody would expect.”

When she received word of the terrorist attacks, Cynthia Shellim lit two candles in memory of the Holtzbergs. A resident of Mumbai, she lives one block away from the Chabad center.

“I met the rabbi and his wife,” she said. “I went there once or twice and met the rabbi. I went to cut chicken. I am kosher.”

Shellim is currently visiting her daughter, Nurith Sweetwood, in Short Hills. Like her mother, Sweetwood grew up in Mumbai, and although she never visited the Chabad House, she was very familiar with the nearby Taj Mahal Hotel, where her parents had celebrated their silver wedding anniversary.

“It was a palace, and they destroyed it,” she said of one of the two landmark hotels targeted by the terrorists. “It is a tragic thing. We can’t get over it.”

In all, more than 170 died in attacks on 10 targets across the Indian city.

Rabbi Zalman Grossbaum, executive director of the Friendship Circle, a project of the Rabbinical College of America and a beneficiary of United Jewish Communities of MetroWest NJ, knew the Holtzbergs casually; “within the Chabad family, it is a small world,” he said.

“They were in many ways a symbol of what happened, but each one of the people who passed away have left an empty place at the table,” Grossbaum said. “Each one of the holy people who passed on are our brothers and sisters. This is a war against humanity, against everything we stand for as peace-loving people. It rips your heart out. It is 9/11 all over again.”

A memorial service is scheduled to be held Dec. 4, at the Leon & Toby Cooperman JCC, Ross Family Campus, in West Orange (see sidebar).

“The terrorists sought to kill victims who were Christians and Jews, British, Americans, and Israelis. But most of the victims were Indian,” said Max Kleinman, executive vice president of United Jewish Communities of MetroWest NJ and a scheduled speaker at the service. “Rabbi Hertzberg and his wife, Rivkah, were martyred together with Israelis who were their guests. They made the ultimate sacrifice.”

‘Danger to the world’

Rabbi Moshe Herson, dean of the Rabbinical College of America in Morristown, said Holtzberg had not been a student at the seminary.

Still, he called the attacks in Mumbai “a wake-up call for us. Each one in his own place must take a look at the security, with just anybody walking in. Chabad is usually a place with an open door for everybody. It shows us we all have to put more attention and be more on the alert of what can happen. We realize who is surrounding us in the entire global community. This is a tremendous danger — not only to Chabad and the United States. I see this as a danger to the entire world.”

Beginning in the third grade, Rabbi Motti Perlow was a classmate of Rabbi Holtzberg’s at Oholei Torah, a yeshiva in Crown Heights, Brooklyn.

“In the later years, we were a lot closer,” said Perlow, a teacher at Yeshiva Gedola in West New York.

“The first impression you got was that he was a very fiery person. He was not afraid of anybody or what anybody said. He always did what he felt needed to be done. He was also a very kind person who knew how to share.”

When Perlow and Holtzberg spent time teaching in Israel, he and other young Lubavitchers “would always crash in his room in Jerusalem,” said Perlow. “He always gave us the key. He would open his room for everybody.”

Although the two men had not seen one another for the past two years, Perlow said, he and Holtzberg “would get together and shmooze” when both of them were in the New York area.

“It is really hard to talk about this,” said Perlow. “It is a very big shock. It is hard to formulate feelings into words. The right thing to do is something that would continue his work so that it shouldn’t go in vain, to support his work and actually expand it.”

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