JERUSALEM (JTA) — The Jewish victims of the attack on the Mumbai Chabad House were laid to rest in Israel.
Thousands attended the memorial ceremony Tuesday in Kfar Chabad, near Tel Aviv, for emissaries Rabbi Gavriel and Rivkah Holtzberg.
President Shimon Peres, Knesset members and Indian representatives, as well as Chabad leaders, were among those in attendance.
Rabbi Moshe Kotlarsky, the vice chairman of the educational arm of Chabad-Lubavitch, announced in his eulogy that the Mumbai Chabad house would be renamed in the Holtzbergs’ memory.
"What can I say Moishi?" said the rabbi, addressing the couple’s 2-year-old son, who was rescued during the siege by his Indian caregiver. "You don’t have a mother and a father to hold you in their arms. No parents to hug and kiss you. You will be the child of the entire nation of Israel. You are an emissary, and an emissary you shall remain."
Several thousand fervently Orthodox Jews filled the streets of the Mea Shearim enclave for the funeral of Aryeh Leibish Teitelbaum, whose family eschewed a state funeral since the non-Zionist Satmar Chasidic sect to which they belong does not recognize the legitimacy of the Jewish state.
Norma Shvarzblat Rabinovich, a Mexican woman who was scheduled to make aliyah Monday, was buried Tuesday in a central Israel cemetery, as were victims Bentzion Chroman and Yocheved Orpaz.
A state ceremony for the victims is scheduled to be held at Peres’ Jerusalem residence on Tuesday evening.
