Sandra Samuel, the heroic nanny who saved the two-year-old child of Chabad-Lubavitch emissaries Rabbi Gavriel and Rivka Holtzberg while Islamist terrorists held their Mumbai Chabad House, didn’t think of the danger she faced until after she had made her miraculous escape.
“Does anyone,” she asks a CNN interviewer in a new documentary of the Nov. 26 attack, “think of dying at that moment?”
Utilizing never-before-seen footage of the heavily-damaged Chabad House and a rapid-response team working feverishly behind the scenes from at Lubavitch World Headquarters in New York, “Moshe’s Story” tells of the escape of Samuel and the Holtzberg’s son and their newfound life with his paternal grandparents in Israel. Part of the news network’s “World’s Untold Stories” series, the half-hour show which aired on Sunday and can be seen online here, draws on interviews with the deceased emissaries’ families and footage and photographs provided by Jewish Educational Media and Chabad.org documenting the Holtzbergs’ service in Mumbai.
The documentary tells a story “of miraculous survival,” says the show’s narrator, “a story of love between a little boy and his nanny, a story of terror visited on a happy home and of the frantic efforts made by the Jewish community in Brooklyn to try to talk to the terrorists during the siege.”
What also emerges is the close bond Samuel felt for the slain couple.
“They were very, very warm. Very giving,” she says. “I was like family to them. … Chabad is only to give, not to take.”
To read a blog about CNN reporter Mallika Kapur’s thoughts on the story, click here.
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