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Perhaps there are two kinds of places in the world: those where common people work and go to school in peace, and those where they die at random, the accidental or intentional victims of a grand political project. For a long time, even amidst terror attacks that killed hundreds of Mumbaikars, Mumbai’s Jews felt as if they lived in the first category. After November, however, and in light of the ratcheting tension in Gaza, there was a sense they’d been forced into the second.
The men in the synagogue shifted their weight and shook their heads. Up in the women’s gallery, ten sets of eyes stared down over the handrail at Sopher. “That’s it,” he called out. “Shabbat Shalom”—a happy and peaceful Sabbath.
After the ceremony, there was an awkward moment as the Chabad rabbis collected the foreigners and left on foot, bound for the rented Sabbath hotel, while the locals went downstairs for an Indo-Jewish meal. The Bene Israel keep the kosher laws below the level of observance that the Chabadniks require, so rarely do the two break bread together.
The Chabad dinner turned out to be carrot slices, tahini, Indian chapati, and, of course, baba ghanoush and coleslaw, heavy on the mayonnaise. The lack of meat was another reminder of the lack of the Holtzbergs; the only meat in Mumbai kosher enough for Chabad standards was at that moment rotting in the freezer on the first floor of Nariman House, surrounded by the clucking pigeons and schnauzer-sized rats that had claimed the building.
Twenty-two people came to dinner, the most since the attacks. There were some from New York, and a pair of honeymooners from Switzerland, and a young couple and their two small children from Judea, as well as a few Israeli businessmen visiting India for work. One family of Bene Israel Indian Jews did attend the Chabad dinner. Doctor Aaron Avraham, a physician at the intensive-care unit of Breach Candy Hospital, where the city’s diplomats and businessmen seek treatment, had been particularly close to the Holtzbergs. During the meal, Dr. Avraham and his wife, two daughters, and son spoke of little besides how much they loved the Holtzbergs, of how friendly and helpful and pious they had been.
After the siege at Nariman House, Dr. Avraham had accompanied the bodies to the morgue, where he had to fight with authorities to prevent autopsies from being conducted, because the procedure is forbidden by Jewish law. At dinner, Avraham began to speak about seeing Gavi’s body for the first time, but Mendy stopped him—“Please, it’s shabbos. Let’s talk about nicer things.” He pointed at a child belonging to one of the guests, a blond-haired boy toddling around the table. “See, isn’t it nice to have young children around?”
“Ah, yes,” said Doctor Avraham, “but you see, everything brings us back to the same topic: I remember how much little Moshe used to love to sing songs with us…” His voice trailed off.
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Later, Doctor Avraham told me more about his experience with the Holtzbergs. Aaron Avraham is short, with walnut-colored skin and dark eyes slightly puffed by his long shifts at the ICU. He wears a black yarmulke and a close-trimmed, gray-flecked beard. He speaks with the quiet intensity of a man confident that his orders will be followed.
Dr. Avraham made friends with the Holtzbergs soon after their arrival in Mumbai, six years before the attacks. Two floors of the Chabad house served as a mini-hotel for Jewish business travelers who needed kosher meals, and Avraham became the hotel’s house doctor. He helped care for the Holtzbergs’ first two sons, Menachem Mendel and Dov-Ber, who both suffered from Tay-Sachs disease, a nervous system disorder caused by a recessive genetic mutation frequently carried by Jews of Eastern European descent. Infants born with Tay-Sachs will become deaf, blind, and unable to swallow; few of them survive past their fifth year of life. Once, when Dov-Ber fell ill on a Friday afternoon and the Holtzbergs needed to attend to their guests at the Chabad house, Avraham stayed with the child overnight at the hospital, until the Sabbath ended. “After Dovy was discharged,” the doctor recalled, “Rabbi tried to give me so much money, but I cannot take it. Instead he gave me a very nice set of the five books of Torah.”
Both of the children were eventually moved to a special clinic in Israel, but there was no question of the Holtzbergs leaving India to join the boys; their work was in Mumbai. Their first son, Mendel, died in 2006. It is possible for adults who both carry the recessive Tay-Sachs gene to have healthy children, so when the Holtzbergs’ third son, Moshe, was born without the disease in 2006, they considered it a miracle. (Their second son, Dov-Ber, would die in January of 2009, just a month after his parents.)
Despite the difficulties the Holtzbergs had with their children, Avraham told me, they were the sweetest and most hospitable people he had known. “Whenever I called Rivki and said, ‘I would like to come for such-and-such a festival,’ she never said no. ‘Why not, Aaron, please come,’ she would say, ‘bring all your children, as many as you can.’”
“Rabbi’s company made me more religious. I used to move without cap,” he said, referring to his yarmulke, “but he told me, ‘you must wear the cap always now. Also, tallit katan.’ So I began to wear it. I move throughout the city in the cap. I move through Muslim areas, but nothing scares me.”
“My wife is very religious, maybe more than me,” he said. “She has learned a lot from Rivki, who was her best friend. Now she is watching no nonreligious programs, listening to no songs other than God songs. Chabad house was very good for her.”
During the November attacks, Dr. Avraham waited outside Nariman House, asking the military for any sign that the Holtzbergs were alive. He hoped to treat them personally, at his hospital. “We’ll talk about it later,” the commandos told him. Then the operation ended, and Avraham received a phone call from another person close to the family, instructing him to go with the bodies and prevent the postmortems. “When I got into ambulance with Rabbi’s body,” he said, “I had no words to explain how I felt.” Later, two of the terrorists were brought to the same morgue. “When I saw them,” the doctor said, “I wanted to crush their bodies into one hundred thousand pieces. If I had found them alive, I would have killed them one hundred thousand times. I wanted at least to hit them with my shoes and my legs, anything. But there were too many police there, so I could not.”
Because of his work, Avraham is well acquainted with death. But why would God take the Holtzbergs, who seemed to live the perfect Jewish life?
“I can’t challenge the hashem for any reason,” he said, “but I would like to ask questions. We were so happy with Rabbi and Rivki. Why he has snatched away our happiness? There has been no answer.”
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Kessler and Sputz managed to function unafflicted by the fathoms-deep sadness that had stricken Dr. Avraham and his family, who looked to the Holtzbergs for guidance on their spiritual journey. Perhaps being born into a lifestyle governed by adherence to the commandments had somehow inured the two young men to this crisis.
I once asked Kessler if he ever doubted the existence of God, or at least, the validity of his myriad commandments.
“Are you serious?” he asked. “No, of course not.”
We discussed it. Rivka and Gavriel Holtzberg came to Mumbai to please God. They were blameless and upright. Their first son died of a terrible affliction. Then they died by violence. Then their second son was carried off by the same disease as their first. In light of these undeserved curses, I asked, “How can you still believe in God? How can he command human behavior and then punish the goodness he’s asked for?”
“Just because I know he exists doesn’t mean I have to understand his acts intellectually,” replied Kessler. Jews study the laws and the interpretations of the laws and the interpretations of the interpretations; what could be more intellectual than Talmudic disputation? But still, the fundamental mystery remains, Kessler said. “If we knew him, we’d be him.”
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