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Kansas Citians knew slain couple at Jewish center in India
Nov 29, 2008 (The Kansas City Star - McClatchy-Tribune Information Services via COMTEX) --
As with other people around the world, Rabbi Berel Sosover, 28, of Overland Park, was following this week's events in Mumbai, India.
When he read that the Chabad Lubavitch Jewish center was one of the places attacked by terrorists, he shivered.
No, he thought, not there. Not the place where his friend had moved three years earlier. His school chum, Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg, and his wife, Rivka, of New York, ran the Chabad-Lubavitch center.
Sosover has known Holtzberg since elementary school. He remembered the teasing he got from his fellow students in Brooklyn when he moved to Kansas.
But when Holtzberg said he was going to India?
"Nobody wanted to go there. It was such a big thing moving to India," remembered Sosover. "I know his family, his sister's family, his brother-in-law. ... He was one year ahead of me." Sosover's voice trailed away with his memories.
When he saw his friend's name online, then his wife's, and then learned how their little boy had escaped, it was all too much. Too surreal. Sosover hugged his two children a little more as the reality of the tragedy sank in.
"He was a person who ran this place for anybody who wanted to, to come and eat or sleep there. He's a jolly person. Somebody who cared for others. ... This is just horrible. ... I just kept checking the Internet, praying they'd be safe. ... And they weren't."
Another Kansas Citian also knew Holtzberg and visited him just a little more than a month ago at the Chabad center.
Professor Stan Edlavitch, 68, who teaches at the University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Medicine, has been there twice in the past two years.
He has sent e-mails to Holtzberg dozens of times, and the two men also by chance caught the same airplane to Bangladesh.
Edlavitch said the Chabad center is not easy to find. It sits at the end of a dead-end street, behind several close buildings.
"You have to know where you're going to get there," said Edlavitch. "You couldn't just find it randomly. I'm afraid those gunmen knew what targets they wanted to hit."
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Memorial service
The Chabad-Lubavitch Torah Learning Center in Overland Park will hold a memorial service Monday for Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg and his wife, Rivka, who were killed in Mumbai, India, at the Chabad center. The service will be from 6:30 to 7:30 p.m. at the center at 8800 W. 103rd St.
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http://www.kansascity.com. Copyright (c) 2008, The Kansas City Star, Mo.
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