President Reuven Rivlin ended his state visit to India by meeting Monday evening with heads of the Jewish community in Mumbai. Rivlin and the local leaders met at the Taj Mahal Hotel, the site of one of the series of terrorist attacks carried out in the city in 2008, which claimed a total of 166 lives. Rivlin placed a wreath in memory of the victims. "Like Israelis, Indians are, sadly, no strangers to the threat and the reality of modern global terrorism. Terror is terror is terror, wherever it strikes," Rivlin said. The president said that hatred, fundamentalism, extremism and incitement were all facets of terrorism, and told the attendees of the memorial ceremony that by standing together at the site of the attack, they were making an explicit statement that terrorism would never win. "We will fight terror, because this is a must for all the free world," the president said. Rivlin also visited Chabad House in Mumbai, the site of another 2008 attack in which six people were killed: Rabbi Gavriel and Rivka Holtzberg, Rabbi Bentzion Kruman, Rabbi Leibish Teitelbaum, Yocheved Orpaz and Norma Shvarzblat Rabinovich. The president placed another wreath in their memory and went upstairs to visit the room of Moishe, the Holtzbergs' son, who survived the attack. Rivlin told Rabbi Yisroel Kozlovsky, the current director of Chabad in Mumbai, that Moishe, his Indian nanny and his grandfather had visited the President's Residence when they arrived home in Israel after the bombing. "Terrorism won't beat us. Am Yisrael chai [the people of Israel live], the free world lives and we will defeat terrorism," Rivlin said.
