Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg was dressed for prayer the moment he was shot, next to a book on terrorism on his bedside table. As Israel mourned the murdered rabbi, his pregnant wife and four other Jews yesterday, a family friend described how he found the bodies amid the carnage of Mumbai.

“I think he was sending us a message. He showed his tremendous dedication to faith, even in his final moments,” Rabbi Dov Goldberg, who was the first civilian to enter the Chabad centre in Mumbai after its two-day siege, told The Times.

Thousands of Orthodox mourners prayed and wept before the shrouded bodies of Mumbai’s six Jewish victims at a ceremony broadcast live on television and attended by Israeli leaders, including President Peres.

Moshe, the Holtzbergs’ two-year-old son, was not at the procession held at Kfar Chabad, the movement’s headquarters in Israel. Rabbi Goldberg said that the boy was “not in good shape” and had not slept for four days. The child escaped from the gunmen with his Indian nanny when the terrorists burst into Mumbai’s Chabad compound.

Rabbi Goldberg revealed that the couple knew their killers. Some of the terrorists had visited the centre on a reconnaissance mission before the attack, and had been given a meal by Rivka Holtzberg, the murdered Rabbi’s 28-year old wife.

Rabbi Goldberg, a friend of the Holtzbergs from school, said that he had no doubt the items left behind by the rabbi were a message to his survivors. “I was called in to identify his body,” he said. “I looked at him and understood that I was the one who would need to make sure that the Chabad lives on; that I would be called on to do this.”

The murdered rabbi’s body was wrapped in tefillin, a prayer aid containing Hebrew scrolls. “I recognised the tefillin on him as his own. I know it was him who must have put the tefillin on himself, even while there were terrorists in his home.”

The Holtzbergs were aware of the dangers that surrounded them as they fostered Jewish life in Mumbai, said Rabbi Goldberg. “Next to the night stand, on the bed, there were several religious books, and next to the books was another [book]: How to Protect Yourself When Terrorists Come to Your House. “There was criticism from people who said it was irresponsible to have them in a place such as [Mumbai]. But we had security. Gavriel was conscious of the risks; he was reading the book because he was a target.”

The couple’s murder is the latest chapter in a story of personal tragedy afflicting the family. They had tried for years to conceive, but their two eldest children were born with Tay-Sachs, a terminal genetic disease. The oldest died. The second is hospitalised in Israel. At the time of her death, Rivka was six months pregnant.

The Holtzbergs had lived in Israel and Brooklyn before they moved to Mumbai in 2003. Rabbi Holtzberg, 29, also had US citizenship.

The religious community has promised to rebuild the Mumbai centre and name it after the Holtzbergs. Chabad, the Orthodox group that runs the Mumbai centre, operates thousands of centres around the world.

The parents of Rivka Holtzberg have suggested that they will return to Mumbai to complete their daughter’s work and raise Moshe in his parents’ former home. Giving a eulogy at the ceremony, Moshe Kotlarsky, a Chabad Rabbi from New York, aimed his message at Moshe, saying: “You don’t have a mother who will hug you. You are the child of all of Israel.”

Times Recommends

• Please help: maimed children of war want their lives back
• Cabal seizes diamond riches to buy power
• White House gatecrashers got to the president