Dear friends,

How are you?

Thank you all for your kind and generous wishes for my birthday. I would like to take this opportunity to bless all of you with health and happiness, Nachas from your family and your friends, descendants as numerous as the stars and the sand, and an abundance of money, Amen.

I am sitting here in my hotel room on the main thoroughfare in Mumbai, India, where just about a year ago, a lone surviving gunman ran down the street that I am looking at after he and his friends spent the better part of three days holding the city of Mumbai hostage. The carnage they left behind is hard to imagine. The general manager of the famous Taj hotel lost his entire family. The pianist at the Oberoi Trident hid under a desk in the business center and watched as seven of his friends were murdered within feet of his hiding place. In the last day and a half that my wife and I have spent here we have met many such people. The scars are deep, and the healing difficult.

But perhaps the most striking thing about the whole story is the way it was taken so personally by so many. Across the world, the story of the attacks in Mumbai had struck a nerve. But it wasn’t the massacre in the great Taj hotel, or the ambush in a busy train station, or even the murder of tourists out for a lunch in a small cafe that caught the attention of the world.

Rabbi Gabi and Rivky Holtzberg, HY”D, who lived in comfortable communities, surrounded by large families, had moved out to far away Mumbai, India, to spread a little light. For five years their home was a beacon of light in a city known for centuries of darkness.

For five years they hosted travelers, taught Torah classes, counseled troubled souls, and in general uplifted the downtrodden, fed the hungry, loved the lonely, and found the lost.

And then terror came for them.

Forces of evil extinguished these lamplighters, and stole a piece of the world’s soul.

The reaction the world over was overwhelming. In the last year, over 500 babies were named for Gavriel Noach or Rivka. Hundreds of thousands of people resolved to better themselves in the memory of these holy soldiers. The entire world was asking, What is a Chabad House? Is there really such a thing as people moving out with their children to any corner of the world, just to help spread a little light?

Last night the local Jewish community got together in Shul to remember their fallen leaders, and to resolve once more to never let their light go out.

My wife and I were present as Ben Tzion, a lonely Jew from Bagdad, stood up and cried for the loss of Gabi and Rivky, the only family he’d ever had, and Rabbi Avraham Berkowitz, the director of Chabad’s Mumbai Relief Fund, made a promise to him before the entire Kehilla that we will never abandon him, that he will never be alone.

And in an hour from now, my wife and I will take a taxi from our comfortable lodgings on beautiful Marine Drive, and we will drive through the city, down through the Colaba market, to a place known as Nariman House. We will have the chance to see first hand the destruction and the horror, and we will try and do our part in the re-dedication.

We must, each one of us, ask ourselves, What can I do to make this world a little better, a little brighter, and little happier? And then we must commit ourselves to doing it.

In the memory of the Kedoshim of Mumbai, and in the merit of all they stood for, let’s change this world once and for all.

–
Benny