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Every year on November 26, a small but deeply moved group of Indian Jews gathers in Israel and in Mumbai to mark the anniversary of the 2008 terrorist attacks that killed 166 people across multiple sites in India’s financial capital. For the Indian Jewish community, the attacks held a particular and personal significance: among the targets was the Chabad House at Nariman House, a Jewish outreach center in the Colaba neighborhood of south Mumbai, where six Jewish individuals including the center’s young rabbi and his wife were murdered by the attackers. The anniversary ceremonies reflect the unique position of Indian Jews as people with profound connections to both the victims’ homeland and the country where the attacks occurred.
Nariman House and the Jewish Connection
The Chabad House at Nariman House was not a historic Indian Jewish institution but a relatively recent addition to Mumbai’s Jewish landscape. Chabad-Lubavitch, the international Hasidic Jewish outreach organization, had established the center a few years before the attacks as a hospitality house for Jewish travelers and businesspeople visiting Mumbai. Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg and his wife Rivka ran the center with characteristic Chabad warmth and energy, hosting Shabbat dinners and Jewish holidays for Jews passing through the city.
The six people killed at Nariman House on November 26-28, 2008, included the Holtzbergs, four other Jewish visitors, and one local Indian Jewish employee. Their deaths shocked not only the global Jewish community but the Indian Jewish community specifically, for whom Mumbai had always been home and whose own families had lived safely in that city for generations. The fact that Jews were specifically targeted at a Jewish institution in a city with no history of antisemitism was profoundly disorienting.
Indian Jews in Israel Respond
In Israel, where tens of thousands of Bene Israel and Baghdadi Jewish immigrants from India live, the response to the attacks was both personal and communal. Many had family members still living in Mumbai and felt the terror of the attacks with an immediacy that Israeli-born citizens without Indian connections could not fully share. In the days following the attacks, Indian Israeli communities gathered for prayers and vigils, holding both the Israeli victims who died at Nariman House and the many Hindu, Muslim, and Christian Indians killed at the other attack sites in their hearts simultaneously.
The dual mourning, for Jewish and non-Jewish victims alike, reflected the genuinely bicultural identity of Indian Jews in Israel. They did not see the attacks as simply an antisemitic attack on Jews, though that element was real and significant, but as an attack on Mumbai, on India, and on the pluralist fabric of a city they still thought of as home.
Annual Commemoration
The annual commemorations of the attacks have become occasions for Indian Jewish communities to reflect on both the losses of that terrible night and the nature of their connection to India. Speakers at memorial events often speak about what India represented for Jewish communities, about the centuries of hospitality that made Mumbai a safe and welcoming home for Jews, and about the specific horror of watching that safety violated by violence.
The commemorations also serve as occasions to honor the memory of the Holtzbergs and the other Jews killed at Nariman House, whose deaths are mourned annually on the anniversary of the attacks. Their son Moshe, who survived as a toddler after being carried out by his Indian nanny Sandra Samuel, has grown up in Israel and has become a symbol of both the tragedy and the resilience of Jewish life.
The Broader Legacy
For Indian Jews, the 2008 Mumbai attacks reinforced the importance of maintaining connection to India even after emigration to Israel or elsewhere. The attacks demonstrated that what happens in Mumbai matters to them personally, that they carry their Indian identity with them wherever they go, and that the safety and security of the country where their families lived for centuries remains a matter of deep personal concern.
The annual commemorations are therefore more than memorials for specific victims. They are affirmations of the continuing bond between the Indian Jewish diaspora and the country that gave their ancestors a home for two thousand years, a bond that not even the worst violence can sever.