Here is a remembrance of Gavriel and Rivka Holtzberg, who were murdered at the Chabad house in Mumbai yesterday. This excerpt, written by By Benjamin Holtzman of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, is from the Crown Heights Info blog

I lived in Mumbai for six months last year, and would go to the Beit
Chabad with friends for a Shabbat meal about every second week. Over
the course of six months, we got to know the rabbi and his wife quite
well.

They were wonderful people: warm, inviting and
engaging. Gabi would get visibly excited to have so many guests for
Shabbat; you could tell it really made his week. He would have a grin
on his face almost the entire meal, including during his dvar Torah. He
was always so eager to create a communal feeling that he insisted
everyone go around the table and say a few words to the group, giving
guests four options: either delivering a dvar Torah, relating an
inspirational story, declaring to take on a mitzvah or leading a song.

As most of the guests were Israeli backpackers and other
passers-through, they might have found this quite novel. For us
regulars, it was just Gabi’s shtick. I can still hear him reciting
those four options to the group now, as if he had discovered some
miraculous way to make everyone involved in the Shabbat with no escape,
impressed by his own genius week in and out. He had a devilish smile;
you could really see the child still in him, just beneath the surface.

Gabi was also exceptionally thoughtful. Though most of the guests were
Israeli, Gabi would give his dvar Torah in English for the sake of the
few of us English speakers there with sketchy Hebrew, so we’d
understand. Sometimes he spoke line by line first in English, then
Hebrew. Gabi would start discussions and made it his personal mission
to get everyone talking, to make a group of disconnected Jews feel like
a family. It worked. That was Gabi.

Rivki was a certified sweetheart. She’d generally sit apart from Gabi,
to spread herself out, and usually sat with the girls. She too relished
Friday night dinners — I think she needed her weekly female bonding
time. She’d talk to the girls about the challenges of keeping kosher in
India and share exciting new finds at the market together.

You could tell she was far from home, in this dense Mumbai jungle, but
she was tough and really made the best of it. She would balance Gabi’s
presence, occasionally making comments to people at her table while
Gabi was speaking — not as a sign of disrespect, but to keep the people
around her having a good time. That was Rivki: brave, fun-loving and
super sweet.

Perhaps the greatest testament to their character was simply the fact
that they lived in downtown Mumbai for years on end. Having lived there
for just six months, I understand how incredibly taxing just existing
in the city is. Even when trying to relax, the city still seems to suck
the life out of you. Living as Westerners in modest conditions in the
thick of Mumbai, with the restrictions of kashrut and Shabbat, is
certainly no small feat.

I’m not sure if they were thrilled with their placement in Mumbai, but
they certainly made a good go of it. They were only a few years older
than me, in their late 20s, and despite being far from friends and
family and perhaps not in the most exciting Chabad placement (compared
to Bangkok, Bogota or Bondi), they kept positive and built a beautiful
bastion of Jewey goodness.

They chose a life that demonstrated such altruism and care, in the
truest sense. The Mumbai Chabad really made a difference to my time in
India, and made me feel that much more at home in such a foreign
country.

It was at Gabi and Rivki’s where I met Joseph Telushkin, the famous
Jewish author. It was at Gabi and Rivki’s where I randomly bumped into
friends of friends from back home. It was to Gabi and Rivki’s where we
brought our non-Jewish Indian friends who became curious in Judaism. It
was at Gabi and Rivki’s where a girl I would later fall for first
developed feelings for me, when I brought her some water while she lay
sick on the sofa from Indian food poisoning. She was being nursed by
Rivki.