A Brooklyn rabbi’s wife was five months pregnant when she was slain in the Mumbai Massacre, her father revealed yesterday in Israel, where thousands of Orthodox mourners packed the funerals for the Jews killed in the attacks.
The bodies of Rivka Holtzberg, wrapped in a shroud, and her husband, Rabbi Gavriel Noach Holtzberg, in a prayer shawl, were laid out earlier on a dais outside the red-brick Israeli headquarters of the Chabad movement.
Then they were taken to Jerusalem’s Mount of Olives for burial, accompanied by thousands of mourners.
“They killed three people, not two,” Rivka’s father, Rabbi Shimon Rosenberg, said at the funeral, disclosing his daughter’s pregnancy.
Four other Jewish victims of the bloody assault on the Chabad House, the Lubavitch center in Mumbai, were buried in Jerusalem and near Tel Aviv. Officials said there was signs of torture on the bodies.
The Holtzbergs, who had lived in Brooklyn and Israel before moving to India, left behind a 2-year-old son, Moshe, who was rescued by his Indian caretaker.
Rabbi Moshe Kotlarsky, a Chabad official from New York, vowed at the Holtzbergs’ service that the boy would be taken care of.
“You don’t have a mother who will hug you and kiss you,” he said in a eulogy. “You will be the child of all of Israel.”
The Holtzbergs’ other son is hospitalized in Israel with Tay-Sachs, a terminal genetic disease.