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The third man by the fridge was Levi Jurkowicz, aged twenty-six. He was born in Morristown, New Jersey, and as a child moved with his family to Lod, Israel, where Rebbe Schneerson had appointed his father the rabbinical authority. He was always a problem child, he told me. At sixteen he left home and traveled, eventually settling in New York City. One of his nine sisters is married to Rabbi Dov Goldberg, and he was visiting the couple in Goa when the attacks began.
His role in Mumbai was nebulous. “Levi helps us with projects, different projects,” Menachem Sputz once told me. A Voice of America story filed days after the attacks called him “a cook who came to Mumbai to visit his sister,” who “has ended up having to prepare hundreds of kosher meals for many of the mourners.” A few weeks later, Indian television network NDTV identified him as a “helper.” By late December, The Times of India was calling him “building-in-charge,” and a Jewish news wire said he was “an official from Chabad who has been in charge of the building.” However, a representative at Chabad headquarters in New York, when I called for confirmation, told me that Jurkowicz was never put in charge of the building and never held any title. “He came of his own volition, as a concerned visitor, just like many people who were affected by the tragedy of the attacks. He paid for his own plane tickets and he was initially helping out as a cook. The fact that he comes from a religious family and wanted to help does not make him an employee or representative of Chabad-Lubavitch.”
Jurkowicz’s hair is shaved close to his head. His blue eyes are limpid, shallow pools. When he flashes his easy smile, the top and bottom rows of his well-shaped teeth do not quite touch, the gap between them alluding to some unspoken conspiracy, though it’s impossible to say whether he’s with you or against you. He is just over six feet tall, with long, meaty arms and a potbelly, premature for a twenty-six-year-old, though suggestive, somehow, of the role he might play later in life, as a politician or broker of backroom deals.
Jurkowicz is not religious himself; he just wants to make money, and not even for money’s sake. “It’s making the money that’s fun,” he told me. He claimed that he used to buy cheap houses in New York and then sell them “to losers who collect cans for a living.” “I work in real estate,” he said, explaining his qualifications for rehabilitating Nariman House. “So this job fits like a glove. You know how Israelis in New York are getting a bad name for raping all the niggers? That’s me.” He noticed my reaction to this statement, and apologized, smiling.
Levi is an all-purpose fixer—he gets things done and enjoys it. “The cops are afraid of me here,” he claimed. “They think I’m in the Mossad, and I never go out of my way to correct them.” It was difficult to tell if people really thought he was in the Mossad, though many seemed afraid of him. He’d been quick to realize that white skin and a bad attitude can take you far in a place like Mumbai; I once saw him grab a police officer’s service rifle, to get the cop’s attention, without suffering any consequences. Levi thought Mumbai was a lot of fun.
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I first joined the Chabadniks on a Friday. The Jewish Sabbath begins on Friday evening at sundown and is traditionally marked by prayer services and a relaxing meal. Kessler, Sputz, and Jurkowicz were making Sabbath dinner at a hotel where they’d rented the kitchen and dining room. For security reasons, the Chabadniks were staying in a different hotel. Generally, Chabad works hard to attract guests to such functions, but in the wake of the attacks and the destruction of Nariman House, the dinners were being held in a secret location, with invitations extended by word of mouth. In the cramped kitchen, four Indian hotel staff were chopping carrots and slicing eggplant for baba ghanoush. Levi Jurkowicz diced vegetables. Mendy Kessler was stirring a big pot of vegetarian casserole; there was no kosher meat available.
Kessler and Sputz follow a very strict interpretation of the dietary laws found in the Torah and expounded upon by generations of Jewish sages, and while there are other Jews in Mumbai, few of them follow the laws with such rigor. There was just one restaurant in the city that the Chabadniks could visit, a falafel place opened by some Israelis a few years ago to capitalize on the Jewish backpacker market. Kessler and Sputz would eat the vegetables there, and they knew that the falafel ingredients were kosher, but they couldn’t just walk in and eat them, because of an orthodox doctrine called bishul Yisroel, which states that for food to be kosher, it must be cooked by a Jew. None of the staff at the falafel place were Jewish, but Mendy and Menachem had an arrangement with the owner: when they wanted to eat, they could get behind the counter and cook for themselves. If the manager on duty didn’t believe that the owner had authorized two excitable, hirsute men to cook in his kitchen, they had to wait while the manager got in touch with his boss to get clearance. This effort yielded them the chance to eat just a single dish, the deep-fried falafel balls listed on the menu as “bullets.”
Mendy stirred the casserole and cursed. “It’s impossible here,” he said, “they don’t have any spices.” He was standing in front of a stainless steel shelf that held tins labeled Dal Vatana, Daram Masala, Util Dal, Mix Masala, Chat Masala. “We need black pepper,” he said. Then a strange look came over his face, as if he’d remembered that he left the gas on back in New York. “Where’s the mayonnaise?” he asked. Without mayonnaise, there would be no baba ghanoush, no coleslaw. Mendy charged Levi with a mission: get mayonnaise from the ruins of Nariman House. Levi invited me to come along, because “it’s no fun to yell at a cab driver by yourself.”
That week, the truckers who haul petroleum were on a nationwide strike, and the filling stations were empty. Taxi drivers sat parked by the side of the road, refusing to take twenty-rupee trips that would burn precious drops of fuel they’d need for a better fare, like a ride to the airport, which might net them four hundred rupees, or eight dollars. For Menachem and Mendy, time was of the essence: during the Sabbath, cooking, handling money, using motor vehicles, and operating machinery are all forbidden, and the light was falling slantwise, pooling shadows in the arched stone window frames of the buildings on the street. But Levi knew how to deal with the strike. He started harassing cops.
“Hey, baba,” he said, using a literally respectful form of address, which from his lips sounded contemptuous somehow, like calling someone “chief” in the United States, “I need a favor.” These weren’t just any cops, either—a federal-level police official was staying in the hotel while investigating the terror attacks, accompanied by a detail of officers carrying vented-barrel submachine guns, automatic pistols tucked into their waistbands. “Need taxi to Colaba,” Levi told a cop, “need now.”
The cop said, “No taxi. Gas strike. Take bus.” Levi gestured to the main road, where now and again a taxi passed. “Many taxis,” he said. “No bus. My mother told me, if I take bus, she come get me and make me come home.” The police officer laughed. “Okay, sir, I help you.” He ran into the street and hailed a cab, holding open the door for us.
In Mumbai, the car horn is many things: a palliative, a preventative, an outlet of distress, a mode of expression to compete with the saxophone. While we drove, every car honked in a different register: some blared, others wheezed, a few shrieked. Even when there were no cars or pedestrians nearby, our driver beeped the horn anyway. Like most taxis in the city, this one had no turn signals, air conditioning, or seat belts. We drove though massive roundabouts that seemed as random and complex as the whorl of a fingerprint. We passed by a blinking digital marquee meant to calm the rattled Mumbaikars, but it had already malfunctioned; it read “a__rt citizen = s_fe city.”