Soon after the assaults in Mumbai, India, began on Wednesday, Nov. 26, word about it had come to Lubavitchers in Milwaukee, according to Rabbi Shmaya Shmotkin, spiritual leader of The Shul in Bayside.
That evening, the local Lubavitch community “became aware of the extent of the danger,” Shmotkin said. About 11:30 p.m., calls went out to form a minyan (prayer quorum) to say Pslams.
By 12:30 a.m., about 20 people met at The Shul, chosen because it was a central location that people from Milwaukee and Mequon could both reach; and they prayed for “several hours,” said Shmotkin.
By Friday, it was clear that Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg and his wife Rivkah had been murdered by the terrorists. Rabbi Shmaya Shmotkin and his father, Lubavitch of Wisconsin director Rabbi Yisroel Shmotkin, sent an e-mail to many recipients, including The Chronicle, urging Jews to perform mitzvot as a way to express “sympathy and compassion” for the victims.
After Shabbat morning services, The Shul held a farbrengen (Chasidic gathering), which drew some 90 people. “I spoke and people stood up and shared their feelings,” he said.
And he was struck by “the way in which people identified” with the Holtzbergs. “People could see them as family members without having even met them,” he said.
Some local people did have direct links to the Holzbergs. Rabbi Menachem Rapoport, executive director of the Joseph and Rebecca Peltz Center for Jewish Life in Mequon, said that his wife Hudie “went to school with [Rabbi Gavriel’s] sisters”; and he himself “worked with his cousins and brother for a while.”
Rabbi Yisroel Shmotkin said he is friends with couple’s parents; and his son, Rabbi Zalman Shmotkin in New York City, helped arrange for the parents to go first to India and then to Israel.
But the reports about the Holtzbergs are affecting local people in ways that go “beyond the personal relations,” said Rapoport. It is as though “we all know them…. Everyone knows a Chabad couple somewhere that has touched their lives.”
Lubavitch of Wisconsin and the Milwaukee Jewish Federation, along with the Harry & Rose Samson Family Jewish Community Center co-sponsored a Community Memorial and Solidarity Gathering, which was set to take place on Tuesday evening, Dec. 2, at the JCC.
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