Mumbai: Nariman House gets new name, new look ahead of 26/11 tenth anniversary

MUMBAI: This Sunday painted a curious picture of hope amid gloom at the Jewish centre of Nariman House in Colaba, which was one of the targets of the 26/11 terror attack. On the eve of the tenth anniversary of the strike, a group of excited children celebrated a birthday party holding balloons and peering through the grenade holes in the walls, while the rabbi described to them the trajectory of the bullets.


The Chabad Centre of worship will be renamed Nariman Light House at a special ceremony presided over by state education minister Vinod Tawde on Monday. The six-storey building has undergone a series of renovations over the past year, and the finished portions will be unveiled. Bullet marks have been preserved on a wall of the second floor where the child survivor Moshe Holtzberg was found sobbing besides the corpses of his parents. The fourth and fifth floors, which suffered maximum damage, still appear like blocks of Swiss cheese, there are so many gaping holes left by grenades and bullets.

Like the building, its residents have renovated their lives while preserving the scars as a reminder. Rabbi

Israel

Kozlovsky, who came to head Chabad House in 2012, named his second son Gaby after the martyred rabbi Gavriel. ``In fact, we performed his naming ceremony in the very room where the couple was slain. It was a magical moment that showed rebirth after death. It proved how a single ray of light is enough to dispel darkness,'' he said.

Moshe Holtzberg, now a young lad of 12, will arrive here from Israel next year in November to celebrate his 13th birthday. "This is the age when we believe a boy passes into manhood. Moshe has said that he would like to be back at Nariman House when he grows up, so things will come full circle,'' Kozlovsky said.

By that time, Nariman Light House will have been fully renovated. Israeli designer Eliav Nahlieli who devised the plan said, "We will convert the ground floor into a garden with a waterfall where visitors can see the history of the Chabad movement and its emissaries. But rather than lead them up floor by floor, we will install an external elevator to take them straight to the rooftop. Here, we have a large plaque with the names of 168 victims who fell to the terrorists. We are hoping we have all the names and did not miss anybody. Then they descend to the lower stories where we have six plaques with information about all the locations which the terrorists attacked. This is the only site to do so.''

Nahlieli said he was staying at the Taj Mahal Palace and Hotel in Colaba during this assignment, and requested the management to provide details of their casualties also, but they declined. "They said everybody in Mumbai would rather forget the incident and move on with their lives. Even at Hotel Oberoi, they only pointed me to a plaque with names of staff members who died during 26/11. They have no record of guests. I found that, well...'' he shrugged.