MIGDAL HA-EMEK, Israel (AP) - After hiding for hours in the besieged Jewish center in Mumbai, Sandra Samuel suddenly heard a cry that made her forget all fear for her own safety: 2-year-old Moshe was calling his nanny’s name.Ignoring crackling gunfire and exploding grenades, she says she charged up the stairs and found the toddler crying by his mother’s body, his pants soaked in blood. She grabbed the child and ran with him to safety.Today, the 44-year-old Indian woman, a Christian, is the Orthodox Jewish toddler’s only remaining link to the life he once knew. Moshe Holtzberg’s Israeli parents died in the assault. Samuel, a recent widow, has left her own two sons and her homeland to move with the child to Israel, where she says she will stay “as long as my baby needs me.”
On Monday, Moshe cheerfully touched and identified in English the animal statues that rimmed the garden of his great-uncle’s home, where he and Samuel are staying in this small northern Israeli town.
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(AP) Indian nanny Sandra Samuel plays with Moshe Holtzberg, 2, orphan of Rabbi Gavriel Noach Holtzberg…
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He sought out Samuel repeatedly, though, smiling as he nestled in her arms.
There was no sign of the inconsolable orphan whose plight captivated millions, his anguished cries of “Eema, Eema!” - “Mommy! Mommy!” - shown worldwide in broadcasts of his parents’ memorial service last week.
“At the beginning, he would burst out crying, but that’s tapered off,” the child’s great-uncle, Yitzhak David Grossman, said. “But he clings to Sandra.”
The trauma has receded, Samuel told The Associated Press. “But he is a baby. He wants to know why his Eema is not coming, why is Abba not coming,” she said, using the Hebrew words for mommy and daddy.
Grossman, the chief rabbi of Migdal Ha-emek, was able to get Samuel a one-year passport and a three-month tourist visa to Israel so the boy would have a familiar face as he recovered from the trauma.
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(AP) Indian nanny Sandra Samuel holds Moshe Holtzberg, 2, orphan of Rabbi Gavriel Noach Holtzberg and…
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Sabine Haddad, a spokeswoman for Israel’s Interior Ministry, said Monday that Interior Minister Meir Sheetrit wants to grant Samuel the status of “Righteous among the Nations,” an honor bestowed upon non-Jews who save the lives of Jews. It would allow her to stay in Israel as long as she wished.
Samuel, who has taken care of Moshe since he was born, worked for more than five years for the child’s parents, Rabbi Gabriel Noach Holtzberg and his wife, Rivkah - whom she calls “my rabbi” and “my Rivki” - in the Mumbai headquarters of the Orthodox Chabad-Lubavitch movement.
It was to have been a temporary job, she said, but she was so captivated by their generous, courageous spirits that she stayed on.
The day of the attack, Nov. 26, had been like any other at the Mumbai Jewish center, the 44-year-old nanny recalled. She had just put the baby to sleep and the dining room was being cleaned up when “suddenly the noise starts. Boom, boom, boom.”
At first, she thought it was children playing in the open space outside the house. She came out of the kitchen to scold them when she saw a man with a gun take aim at her. She slammed the door shut, still not sure if the gun was real or a toy - until she saw the bullet hole in the door.
She dialed the rabbi’s cell phone, heard a mix of voices, but still didn’t understand that the house was under attack. There was no screaming from upstairs, where the hostages were, though she said she did hear Rivkah Holtzberg cry and call out her husband’s name, as well as things being thrown and shoved.
Gunfire and grenade explosions followed. The house was under siege - a takeover that would end only after Indian commandos, some rappelling onto the roof from a helicopter, stormed it 36 hours later.
Samuel hid between two refrigerators for hours, leaving her hiding place the next morning only “when I heard my baby cry.” She found Moshe standing by his mother’s body in a corridor; his father lay nearby, sprawled on his stomach. She also saw the bloody legs of another man.
Cradling the child in her arms, she sprinted out of the house to safety.
Samuel said she did not believe the Holtzbergs were dead at the time she fled, though she did see blood near the rabbi’s leg. Four other Jews also died in the attack.
Samuel wonders whether the gunmen might have knocked the boy unconscious. She said he had five finger-shaped bruises on his back and did not cry out during the night as he usually did. A spokesman for Chabad in Israel, Menachem Brod, has said the family did not think the boy was abused.
Samuel is having trouble coming to terms with the horror of the attack.
“Even now, I can’t really believe it has happened,” she said.
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On the Net:
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