Orphaned in the terrorist attack on Chabad House in Mumbai, two-year-old Moshe is now with his grandparents in Israel. The Sunday Express visits him in Afula in Israel as he settles into his new surroundings.

Legend has it that Moses, the most important prophet of the Jews and a significant religious leader for Christians and Muslims too, was ordered by God to deliver the Hebrews from slavery during Biblical times. Moses is said to have fulfilled his task by leading the slaves out of Egypt through the Red Sea and received the 10 Commandments. Rabbi Shimon Rosenberg believes that just as the prophet emerged from the water, his two-year-old grandson Moshe, which is Hebrew for Moses, miraculously emerged unscathed from fire—the 26/11 terror attack on Chabad House in Mumbai in which Moshe’s parents Rivki and Gavriel Holtzberg were killed along with four other Jews.

The comparisons to divinity don’t end there. Rabbi Moshe Kotlarsky, the New York-based global chairman of the Conference of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement, stops by in Afula in northern Israel on his way to Mumbai, carrying loads of goodies for the chubby little boy who now lives here with his grandparents. Among them is a stuffed-toy version and a holy scripture version of the Torah, the most holy of the sacred writings of Judaism, believed to have been authored by Moses. “When Moshe grows up, I want him to return to Mumbai,” says his grandfather. “And do what his father was doing, helping people without discriminating between them by their religion, colour or nationality.”

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