Rivka Holtzberg, the 27-year-old wife of Chabad House Rabbi, Gavriel Holtzberg, would frequently visit her family in Israel and stay on for a month or two, leaving her husband behind at the Jewish centre in Mumbai. Sandra Samuel, the nanny of their son Moshe, feels her latest separation from whom she calls “my Rivki”, is one such. “I feel like I will see her soon one of these days,” Sandra says. “Even now I don’t feel like she’s gone.”

It’s been one month since that night of horror on November 26 when the little-known orthodox Jewish centre in a Colaba lane in south Mumbai was targeted by Lashkar-e-Toiba terrorists. But for Sandra, who is now a couple of time zones away from Mumbai in this nondescript northern Israeli town, it all seems like yesterday. “It is still fresh in my mind. I can’t forget it, I can’t sleep,” she told The Indian Express.

Forty-four-year-old Sandra’s name made international headlines after she managed to flee the Chabad House building on the morning of November 27 with Moshe, the two-year-old son of Gavriel and Rivka, when there was a lull in the firing by the two Lashkar men who had laid siege. Within days they were both whisked away to safety in Israel, where little Moshe has been dubbed the ‘Miracle of Mumbai’ while Sandra is being called a “hero” for saving the life of a Jew and has become a mini celebrity.

But the nanny and her ward are struggling to come to terms with the tragedy that has swept through their lives even as they try to get accustomed to new surroundings, a new culture, new people and new living conditions such as the cold winter. Moshe clings to Sandra, the only person he knows from his life in Mumbai, and sleeps with her in a first-floor room. “In Mumbai, he would sleep at nine and when we came here he would go to bed by 6.30 p.m. or 7 which is roughly the time difference I think,” Sandra said. “Now he doesn’t sleep until very late and even I don’t sleep. I manage to close my eyes around 1 and barely sleep for two or two-and-a-half hours.”

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