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MUMBAI - Jews in Mumbai are celebrating Passover, with the annual festival tinged with poignancy after the death of a respected rabbi and his wife during last year's militant attacks on the city.
The ultra-orthodox Chabad-Lubavitch movement will host traditional feasts, or seders, which take place on the first two nights of the eight-day festival that marks the freeing of the Israelites from slavery in ancient Egypt.
But the celebration will not take place at the organisation's Nariman House complex in south Mumbai, which was seized by two Islamist extremist gunmen in November and partially destroyed in fierce fighting with security forces.
Six people inside were killed, including the head of the mission, Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg and his wife Rivka. The couple's young son, Moshe, escaped the carnage with his Indian nanny.
An article posted on the Chabad-Lubavitch website said "there will be seders in Mumbai this Passover" but the location is being kept secret because of security fears.
The New York-based organisation's Mumbai operation has been working from a small, temporary apartment since the strikes, which left 165 people dead and injured more than 300 others.
No permanent replacement for Holtzberg has been appointed and rabbinical students have been on month-long placements to keep the movement's activities here going.
The article said Rivka's Passover dishes, tables and chairs from Nariman House will be used for the feast, which includes unleavened bread, bitter herbs to represent slavery and four cups of wine or grape juice to celebrate freedom.
"For those who've been with the Holtzbergs last Passover, the bitter herbs on this year's seder plate will be doubly pungent," the lubavitch.com article added.
Californian Yechezkel Denebeim, who arrived in Mumbai from New York, was quoted as saying that the Holtzbergs were noted for their Passover celebrations. Last year, some 200 people marked the festival at Nariman House.
"They were the reason so many came here, and returned again and again," he said.
Another student, Schneur Lifshitz, was quoted as saying that "all of it, everything we are doing (for Passover), is because of Gabi and Rivki".
No one at the Chabad-Lubavitch movement in Mumbai was immediately available for comment when contacted by AFP.
Members of the organisation have vowed that five-storey Nariman House, which served as an education centre, synagogue and hostel for visiting Israelis, will eventually be rebuilt.
Rivka Holtzberg's father, Shimon Rosenberg, told a memorial service on December 1 last year: "They (Gavriel and Rivka) were the mother and father of the Jewish community in Mumbai. The House of Chabad will live again." --AFP
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