Nanny recounts saving rabbi's son in Mumbai attack

By Krittivas Mukherjee

MUMBAI (Reuters) - His face framed by golden curls, tiny Moshe Holtzberg is the center of attention for Mumbai's small Jewish community as it mourns the loss of the boy's rabbi father and mother, both killed by Islamist gunmen.

The orphaned Moshe, who turned two this week, is now in the care of his mother's parents after his nanny miraculously rushed him to safety while militants roamed the Jewish center where the family lived and worked.

"When the baby emerged with the nanny, he had blood stains on him," Benjamin Isaac, secretary of the Indian Jewish Federation told Reuters. "Thankfully it wasn't his blood. But we knew someone's blood had already been spilled."

Wednesday, two gunmen had stormed the six-storey Nariman House, which housed the center in Mumbai's Colaba area, a nondescript address on a small street but close to the ritzy hotels and railway station which bore the brunt of a string of attacks by heavily armed militants.

They took eight people hostage, including the wife and child of Israeli-born Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg, 29, who arrived in Mumbai in 2003 to run a synagogue and Torah classes as part of the worldwide Chabad-Lubavitch Movement.

Moshe's nanny, Sandra Samuel, who was on the first floor of the building when the gunmen arrived, locked herself in a room in a desperate bid to stay alive.

"The whole night I heard gunshots and loud blasts," she said in a statement to police. "Next morning it was quiet for a while, when I heard the baby crying."

Samuel quietly unbolted the door, and went up to the second floor where she found Moshe crying next to four people lying motionless on the ground. She picked him up and dashed out.

A handyman who worked for the family also managed to escape.

As the siege of the building dragged on, elite commandos were dropped by helicopter onto the roof of the building, the same men who would later blast their way through the center, ending the standoff after almost two days of intense fighting.

By then the militants had killed the remaining hostages, including Holtzberg and his 28-year-old wife, Rivka.

At a police station Thursday, Moshe sat clutching a grimy doll surrounded by Jewish volunteers, while Samuel described her horrifying ordeal.

VULNERABLE

He has since been handed to his maternal grandparents, Shimon and Yehudit Rosenberg, who flew to India from Israel with members of ZAKA, Israel's dominant non-governmental rescue-and-recovery organization which specializes in collecting human remains to ensure a proper Jewish burial.

Fewer than 5,000 Jews remain living among India's billion-plus people, but the faith has a long history here, with the first established community thought to have been formed in the southwestern state of Kerala before AD 70.