Another Day Of Infamy

by The Editors

And so Mumbai joins Kishinev, Hebron, Berlin, Babi Yar, Maalot, Sbarro’s, Sderot (we could easily mention 150 other sites) to the annals of sudden infamy. Another “wake-up call,” we’re told, for a somnambulant world. It is somehow perverse, even cruel, however, to speak of a wake-up call when the six Jews killed in Mumbai by Islamic terrorists were preceded by more than 2,000 Jews killed (and 5,000 wounded, some horrifically) by Islamic terrorists in the last decade alone.

We hear too often — from Iran’s Ahmadinejad, from scores of American professors, from even a former president — that anti-Zionism is not anti-Semitism, that demonizing Israel as an unlawful, apartheid state is not tantamount to legitimizing Jewish death. What, then, are we to make of the

fact that the Jews of the Mumbai Chabad were targeted for death, according to one report, for the sake of the Palestinians (among the numerous other grievances said to have been claimed by the killers)?

The word “Nazi” is all too cheaply dispensed these days, but there was something evocative of the Gestapo in the jihadist choice to single out the Jews of the Chabad House — alone among the multitude of religions and religious centers in Mumbai — for not only extermination but a unique level of torture.

According to an Indian news service, one doctor in Mumbai said, “of all the bodies, the Israeli [Jewish] victims bore the maximum torture. ... It was so bad that I do not want to go over the details even in my head again.”

Let us also remember who these Jews were in life. In contrast to the jihadists, Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg and his wife Rivkah offered open doors, spiritual refuge and love to anyone, no questions asked. It was a love that is mirrored every day by more than 3,500 Chabad emissaries in more than 1,300 institutions in scores of countries and college campuses on every continent.

Let us also remember that the State of Israel spreads its own sheltering wings over Jews, even in distant Mumbai, wherever Jews are on this planet. It was Israel that flew aid to Mumbai and ensured the dignity of each of the Jewish dead. In the end, in that Chabad House, whether the Jews were from the U.S. or Mexico, all the Jews were “Israeli.”

For all of the concern that we Jews are becoming a diffused amalgam of increasingly lost tribes, alienated from each other and common purpose, Mumbai reminds us that the pain of six Jews anywhere retains the power to send chills into Jewish hearts, anywhere.

Despite the remarkably differing paths taken to that Chabad House by the victims, paths that wound through many countries and starkly different religious choices, we saw ourselves in them, we knew them, and they saw in each other camaraderie, fellow Jews to break bread with, to sing and dine with. It didn’t really matter who was secular and who was a chasid; each was climbing the same Jacob’s Ladder to a shared fate and, we pray, a heavenly reward.

Westchester Jewish Conference

Westchester’s Jewish Community Relations Organization