In the November 26, 2008, Muslim attacks on Mumbai's city center, the Chabad Nariman Community Center was deliberately targeted. Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg and his wife Rivka Holtzberg, six months pregnant, were viciously killed in a torture murder so horrible that it cannot be described. The Rabbi was a close childhood friend our our Rabbi. The personal connection brought emotional intensity to the services held after the attack. The July 13, 2011, Mumbai attacks occurred 4 blocks from the ancestral home of my son's wife's father's family, where 3 of her paternal aunts still live and which my son's wife visited in her childhood on family visits to their home. Visiting my son's family recently on the occasion of the birth of their first child (and our first grandchild), we talked with his wife's mother at length about the family home and its proximity to the bombings. Such emotional closeness to distant tragedy and its accompanying grief is taken into consideration by the plotters of terrorism. Terrorism affects many people who are emotionally close to the event, even though geographically distant. That is why it is a weapon of choice in warfare.
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