(JNS.org) — India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi had an “emotional” meeting with the Jewish child whose parents were killed in a terror attack on the Chabad House in Mumbai in 2008.
Modi and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met with Moshe Holtzberg at a hotel in Tel Aviv. The Indian leader tweeted after the visit that it was “an emotional moment to meet young Moshe.”
Moshe, who read a statement in English and Hebrew, spoke of his desire to follow in his parents’ footsteps.
“I hope I will be able to visit Mumbai, and when I get older, live there. I will be the director of our Chabad House,” he said. “With God’s help, this is my answer.”
Rabbi Yisroel Kozlovsky, the current co-director of Chabad-Lubavitch of Mumbai, said in a statement that he was “glad that Prime Minister Modi met with Moshe and recognized the sacrifice of his parents, an exceptional couple and our personal role models, to establish Chabad-Lubavitch in Mumbai and their service to the Jewish people.”
In the Mumbai attack, which was carried out by a Pakistani Islamic terrorist organization as part of a larger siege on the Indian city, six people were killed, including Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg and his wife Rivka. Moshe, who was 2-years-old at the time, survived due to the heroics of his Indian nanny Sandra Samuel.
Moshe, now 11, was sent to live in Israel with his grandparents and nanny, who was given Israeli residency and earned the country’s “Righteous Among the Nations” honorific for non-Jews.
