When I read of the Islamic terrorists attacking an Hasidic Chabad Center in Mumbai, India, I thought of Chabad House at the UT campus where I enjoyed a Passover seder with another likewise-unattached journalist, and a few young bachelor musicians, one very humid spring night more than twenty years ago.
It’s not hard to imagine that place being invaded by Muslims with grenades and AKs or for them to find people like Rabbi Holzberg and his wife. I’m sure they were as welcoming as the Chabad Lubavitchers of Austin and, of course, they paid for it with their lives. There’s a story now that the attackers cased the Mumbai center in advance, where they must have met the young couple they would later slay. The Austin rebbe, whose name I don’t remember, led our all-male seder (the women cooked and served) in so many toasts and regaled us with so many scholarly jokes that the evening still is a warm, alcoholic blur. But I don’t recall the food being as bad as Roger Simon remembers the cuisine at his daughter’s Chabad Sunday School in Los Angeles. The Austin ones did then and still do the outreach to Jews and non-Jews that Roger, and some of his commenters, speak of here, which makes them vulnerable.
THE TEXAS SCRIBBLER 