JERUSALEM — A somber Israel on Tuesday buried six victims of last week’s terrorist attack on a Jewish outreach center in Mumbai, India.
Two of the victims, Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg, 29, and his wife, Rivka, 28, were serving as emissaries in India for the Hasidic Chabad-Lubavitch movement when they were killed. They were buried side by side after dark in the Chabad portion of the ancient Jewish cemetery on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem.
The rabbi, who held dual Israeli and American citizenship, and his wife, an Israeli, had run the center in Mumbai for the past five years.
Israelis have been deeply moved by the story of the couple and their son Moshe, 2, who survived the attack on the center when his Indian nanny scooped him up and escaped from the building more than 12 hours into the bloody siege.
Moshe arrived in Israel on Monday night, along with his nanny, Sandra Samuel, and Mrs. Holtzberg’s father, on an Israeli Air Force flight that transported the six bodies.
Chabad spokesmen said the couple were buried near their eldest son, who died two years ago of Tay-Sachs, a genetic disease. A middle son is hospitalized in Israel with the same illness.
The memorial ceremony started hours earlier in Kfar Chabad, a village south of Tel Aviv where there is a replica of the red-brick building at 770 Eastern Parkway in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn, the world headquarters of Chabad.
President Shimon Peres, Defense Minister Ehud Barak, the opposition leader, Benjamin Netanyahu, the chief rabbis of Israel and the Indian ambassador attended the service at Kfar Chabad.
“For several days now, the whole world has had to answer the question of a small child, Moshe, who is asking, ‘Where is my mother?’ ” Mr. Peres said in his eulogy. “The world must answer why a wonderful woman like Rivka was killed, why a holy man like Gavriel was killed and why Moshe is left an orphan. We will not rest and we will not relax until an answer is found.”
In his eulogy, Rabbi Moshe Kotlarsky, the chairman of Chabad’s education arm, said of the orphaned boy: “You will be the child of the entire nation of Israel. You are an emissary, and an emissary you shall remain.”
Mrs. Holtzberg’s father revealed in his speech that his daughter was pregnant at the time she was slain.
Among the other hostages buried on Tuesday in Israel was Aryeh Leibish Teitelbaum, 38, a kosher food supervisor and the father of eight. A member of an ultra-Orthodox sect that opposes Zionism, Mr. Teitelbaum, an American, rejected Israeli citizenship though he lived in Jerusalem. His family requested a funeral without state symbols.
Another of those buried, Norma Schwartzblatt-Rabinowitz, 50, from Mexico, had planned to immigrate to Israel via India this week.
Rabbi Motti Seligson, a spokesman for Chabad in Brooklyn, said that more than two dozen people from the Crown Heights community flew to Israel for the funeral of Rabbi Holtzberg and his wife. At the Lubavitcher Yeshiva in Brooklyn, more than 1,000 people gathered at 6 a.m. Tuesday to watch a live feed of the two-and-a-half-hour funeral, which was recorded and is available at the Web site www.chabad.org.
Liz Robbins contributed reporting from New York.
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