Orphan of slain rabbi in Mumbai lands in Israel

? The cries of little Moshe Holtzberg wounded hearts Monday at a tearful memorial for his parents in India. “Mommy, mommy, mommy!” he wailed, clutching a toy basketball while squirming in the arms of mourners at the Mumbai synagogue.

Then the toddler and the caretaker who rescued him from the terrorist attack boarded a jet along with the bodies of his parents and four other Jews slain at the Chabad House to fly to Israel — a place the curly-haired 2-year-old had never seen.

The wrenching scene at the service played over and over again on Israeli television as government officials, Chabad leaders and relatives prepared for the funerals of the victims and the future of the orphaned Moshe.

The Israeli air force plane landed at Israel’s international airport just before midnight and Israeli officials joined relatives and friends of the victims.

Moshe’s father, Rabbi Gavriel Noach Holtzberg, 29, and mother, Rivka, 28, ran the headquarters of the ultra-Orthodox Chabad Lubavitch movement in Mumbai. They were among six Israeli citizens killed at the center during the city’s three-day terror siege.

Moshe was spirited out of Chabad House on Thursday by Sandra Samuel, a nanny who had worked at the center for years. She found him crying beside his parents’ bodies, his pants drenched in blood.

“I don’t know that he can comprehend or that he will remember seeing his parents shot in cold blood,” said Robert Katz, a New York-based fundraiser for Migdal Ohr, an Israeli orphanage founded by the boy’s family.

Moshe was accompanied to Israel by his maternal grandparents, Yehudit and Shimon Rosenberg, who had flown to Mumbai on Friday. Samuel came along, too, to provide the dazed child a familiar face as he starts his new life.

Though Samuel had no passport or papers, Moshe’s granduncle, Rabbi Yitzchak David Grossman, helped arrange for her to get a visa to Israel. In a sad coincidence, Grossman is founder of the Migdal Ohr orphanage.