Modi meets 26/11 child survivor in Israel

TEL AVIV: In a special gesture, Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Wednesday met Moshe Holtzberg, the Israeli child who was just two years old when he lost his parents in the 2008 Mumbai terror attack.

Modi's decision to meet Moshe, now 11, along his grandparents was an emotional moment for the family.

Modi also met Moshe's Indian nanny Sandra Samuels, who managed to escape with him from the Nariman House which came under attack by Pakistan-based LeT terrorists, and his grandparents Shimon and Yehudit Rosenberg.

Moshe was two when his parents Rivka and Gavriel Holtzberg, serving as emissaries of Chabad in Mumbai, were killed along with six others by terrorists at the Nariman House, also popularly known as Chabad House.

The Nariman House was one of the five places targeted by the terrorists, killing 166 people.

Moshe now lives in Afula,

Israel

, with his grandparents -- Rabbi Shimon Rosenberg and his wife Yehudit Rosenberg. He now goes to a yeshiva (religious school). He is still very attached to his nanny Sandra who works in Jerusalem and joins the family over the weekends.

Israel honoured Sandra with an honorary citizenship in September 2010.

She works with young kids in Jerusalem during the week and joins the Rosenberg family in the north during the weekends.

Before the meeting Modi, Moshe's grandfather had said he wanted to do his grandson's 'bar mitvah', a ceremony performed for Jewish boys at the age of 13 which Indian scholars in Israel compare with upnayana or the thread ceremony, in Mumbai for which he would invite Modi.