Local Chabad leaders and national movement mobilized by Mumbai

Area Jews were urged to "do Jewish" during a Dec. 7 memorial and prayer service for Rabbi Gavriel and Rivka Holtzberg and the other Jews murdered in the Mumbai terrorist attacks. Conducted by Chabad Lubavitch of Camden and Burlington Counties, the service was held at the Cherry Hill Chabad Center.

Lighting memorial candles during the Dec. 7 service for the Jews murdered in Mumbai are (from left), Rabbi Yitzchok Kahan, Chabad in Medford, with Hebrew school students Gillian Kramer and Arianna Moskovich. Mourners filling the sanctuary, as well as rabbis and community leaders conducting the service, represented all segments of South Jersey's Jewish Community.

Area Chabad Lubavitch President Joel Chack introduced the program. Rabbis Eprhaim Epstein, Cong. Sons of Israel; Barry Schwartz, Cong. M'kor Shalom; Aaron Krupnick, Cong. Beth El and Yisroel Serebrowski, read from Psalms, and Rabbi Yitzchok Kahan, Chabad Lubavitch in Medford and David Farber, president of the Jewish Federation of Southern NJ, reflected on the terrible loss perpetuated by the Mumbai attacks.

A memorial video presentation— depicting the journey of the late Rabbi Gavriel and Rivka Holtzberg from their comfortable lives in New York to their pioneer venture among India's Jews—was followed by Cantor Isaac Horowitz, Cong. Sons of Israel, singing E-l Molai.

The service closed with Rabbi Mendel Mangel, Chabad Lubavitch in Cherry Hill, urging the mourners to honor the memories of the victims of the Mumbai attacks, and ensure that the Hotzbergs' deaths would not be in vain, by doing the following mitzvot:

Shabbat and holiday candles, tefillin, Torah study, say a prayer, charity and acts of kindness, mezzuzah, kashrut and family purity.

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Nationally, Chabad- Lubavitch leaders are working overtime to transform the Mumbai attacks into an unparalleled opportunity for spreading the movement's message.

Chabad has received unprecedented media exposure since terrorists struck its center in Mumbai, killing its two emissaries in the Indian city — Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg and his wife, Rivkah — along with four other Jews.

To capitalize on the wave of attention, the movement has conducted an orchestrated marketing and public relations campaign. Chabad officials in New York and emissaries around the world are conducting media interviews, and constituents who have been touched by the movement are reaching out in droves to local and international publications to extol its praises.

The Chabad media operation, which is run from the office of the movement's official Web site, Chabad.org, kicked into high gear when news started to filter in Nov. 26 that the Mumbai Chabad house was among the institutions besieged by gunmen in terrorist raids that ultimately saw the deaths of 172 people, including nine terrorists.

By the time the deaths in the Chabad house had been confirmed, the movement's media liaisons had spent several consecutive days in their New York offices, working on little or no sleep, as hundreds of calls poured in from the international media seeking interviews about the Holtzberg family and Chabad in general.

With the interview requests mounting, according to one spokesman, Chabad handpicked emissaries to speak with the media that officials believed would best represent the movement to a general public that may have had little or no knowledge about it.

The message was twofold: Gavriel and Rivkah Holtzberg would have wanted their deaths used as inspiration to help bring Jews closer to Chabad and Judaism, and the movement's late spiritual leader, Rabbi Menachem Schneerson, taught that it was a religious obligation to take a dark moment and turn it into a positive.

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The strategy is to help the audience to "become a continuum of the holy world of Gavi and Rivkah so that they have a way to channel their own personal grief in a manner that makes this world a better place," a spokesman for Chabad, Zalman Shmotkin, told JTA. The emissaries are trying to "sensitively and articulately convey the basic messages of urging people to increase their own acts of goodness and kindness" in response to tragedy.

Within a week of the attacks, Chabad had also raised about $1 million through mailboxes it had opened on Chabad.org—one for helping to raise Moshe, the Holtzbergs' 2-year-old son who escaped the attack on the Chabad house, and one to help rebuild the Chabad of Mumbai, which was damaged badly by explosions and gunfire during the terrorists' siege and attempted rescue by Indian Special Forces.

Such publicity and fundraising efforts in the wake of tragedy may strike some as crass, if not inappropriate and offensive. But the approach can just as well be understood as a natural reaction for a movement that prides itself on Schneerson's success in helping to rebuild Jewish life around the globe after the Holocaust and push ahead to unexpected and unprecedented heights after his death in 1994.

In recent days, Chabad officials have spoken openly about their strategic response to the attacks.

"It is an opportunity to connect more and more Jews to the mission, and to the rebbe's mission of getting every Jew involved. And part of that is channeling the empathy people are now feeling," said Rabbi Yosef Kantor, the director of the Chabad of Thailand and the emissary who helped established the movement's presence in Mumbai prior to the Holtzbergs' arrival.

"I see this as being a big package or opportunity to be able to inspire and direct Jews on how they can channel their outpouring of support and sympathy, their emotion, rage, outrage and frustration," he said.

Even within the context of mass executions, the story of the Holtzbergs is compelling. A young couple from New York in their early 20s set off for an exotic land to fulfill a benevolent, religious mission to provide a home away from home to traveling Jews and Israelis. After establishing themselves and building a community, they were struck down in a horrific terrorist attack—apparently targeted specifically because of their Jewish mission—leaving behind their toddler son, who was heroically rescued by his Indian housekeeper the day before his second birthday.

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It is difficult to quantify exactly how much press Chabad has received as the result of the Mumbai massacre, but a few days after the attacks a Google news search of "Chabad and Mumbai" turned up more than 3,000 entries, compared to about 5,000 in a search only containing "Mumbai." Many major newspapers published features on Chabad's local and global efforts. CNN.com posted at least 10 video segments featuring Chabad and the Holtzbergs, including a fourminute segment dedicated exclusively to describing the movement's activities.

In addition to the straight news coverage, major newspapers around the world, including The Wall Street Journal, published opinion pieces lauding Chabad from writers who have been personally affected or touched by the movement.

Dozens of print journalists, as well as camera crews form major news networks, covered a Chabad-organized news conference on Nov. 28 at the movement's Jewish Children's Museum in Brooklyn, N.Y., shortly after the Chabad house deaths had been confirmed. Footage from the conference, which featured emotional announcements from top Chabad leaders, was broadcast throughout the world.

The news conference became the platform as well for the chairman of Chabad's education and social services arm, Rabbi Yehuda Krinsky, who oversees the movement's emissaries, to announce that Chabad was starting a fund to pay for Moshe's upbringing.

While the immediate fund raising was geared toward helping the toddler and rebuilding in Mumbai, the stepped-up publicity may also prove to be a boon for Chabad houses. Chabad emissaries usually receive minimal seed money to start their outposts, but each house is responsible for raising its own budget each year. Though Chabad does not keep a formal database on how much each outpost raises, officials estimate that the emissaries combined take in more than $1 billion per year.

Fund raising in the aftermath of Mumbai is more than a necessary evil, Chabad officials say—it is part and parcel of their mission to bring Jews closer to their Judaism. .