The Chabad House of Mumbai was one of the 12 sites that Pakistani Islamist terrorists targeted between November 26 and November 29, 2008. Howard Husock recalls that Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg, his wife Rivka, and their unborn child were among the 166 victims murdered in the attack. AEI’s Howard Husock recently visited the Chabad House and reports from the scene in his Wall Street Journal column “The Jewish revival inside Mumbai.”
The building that was the scene of the attack has been restored. Rabbi Yisroel Kozlovsky and his wife Chaya have revived the Chabad mission. Rabbi Kozlovsky “has set out to build an artistic multimedia memorial to educate the hundreds of visitors, almost all non-Jewish Indians, who come here each week, mainly through class trips. ‘Restoration and resilience are not good enough responses to terror,’ he says of the project. ‘We are building a memorial and museum to teach history, to be a beacon of light.’” Husock concludes:
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The portion of the memorial that has been completed recounts what happened at Chabad as well as every Mumbai site targeted during the four-day attack. The walls bear the names of the deceased, including plaques that detail what happened. There are plans to do much more, including re-creating the bedroom of the slain rabbi and his wife as an exhibit about Jewish life. For now the room remains eerie and empty, its walls cracked by bullets.
Perhaps most moving is what the rabbi unironically calls the “jewel in the crown.” That is the bedroom of the Holtzbergs’ then 2-year-old son, Moshe, including his crib. He somehow survived the attack and was retrieved by two Chabad employees who found him standing between his parents’ bloodied bodies. “It was a miracle that happened,” says Rabbi Kozlovsky, describing how “a Christian nanny and a Muslim kitchen worker risked their lives to save a Jewish boy.” The two spirited the toddler away from the building, even as it was still occupied by the terrorists. The story has resonated at the highest levels in India. For Moshe’s bar mitzvah in Israel in 2019, Prime Minister Narendra Modi sent a congratulatory note to the boy, whom he had met on a visit to Israel two years earlier.
Rabbi Kozlovsky dreams of a far more elaborate exhibit that will be a “must-see Mumbai tourist attraction.” It will educate visitors “to help make sure events like 26/11 will not happen again” by “awakening them to our responsibility every day of our lives.” He is gratified by the notes he gets from schoolchildren about the small acts of charity their visits have inspired them to undertake. “It is our responsibility . . . to do what we can to help light win out over darkness. We want every visitor to walk out with that message.”
The Chabad House of Mumbai, an outpost of the Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidic Jewish movement, hasn’t only recovered from its encounter with death. It is thriving, writes Howard Husock https://t.co/9ERyg19YaB
— Wall Street Journal Opinion (@WSJopinion) June 1, 2025
