Moishe Holtzberg of Mumbai

The two-year-old, in Israel now after his parents were gunned down last week, evokes tears and stirs a childhood memory.

One day when I was ten, in a Bronx park, a band of kids from another neighborhood suddenly attacked half a dozen of us. In the melee, I was pinned against a tree by a bigger boy. He held me with one hand and kept driving a fist at my head as hard and fast as he could. I warded off most of the blows with my arms, but I couldn’t take my eyes off his furious face. While struggling to escape, I was transfixed by a rage I had never seen before--it was like being caught in a storm.

When it was over, I asked an older boy from our neighborhood why.

"They hate us because we're Jews," he said. "They say we killed Christ."

"Did we?"

"How the hell should I know? It happened a million years ago."

From then on, I lived in a world among those who despised people like me enough to inspire special words for our slaughter--pogrom, genocide, Holocaust--and by those with euphemisms for killing the spirit, if not the body: “restricted” and “gentlemen’s agreement,” and those on the streets and in barracks where the expressions were raw but honest--kike, sheenie, Hebe.

They made it clear I belonged to a people fated to be despised and driven, their names their crime, the shape of their noses their destiny. Faced with such hatred of a religion I could never feel in my heart, it would have been unthinkable to stop being a Jew or calling myself one.

Last week in Mumbai, the killers were apparently Muslims motivated by murderous hatred of Hindus, but they took the time for a detour to slaughter Jews in a Hasidic headquarters. An Indian nanny saved Moishe as his parents Gavriel and Rivka died.

The boy is in a village near Tel Aviv now, where during a memorial service, a rabbi told him, "You don't have a mother who will hug you and kiss you. You are the child of all Israel."

As he grows up, someone will have to explain to him why his parents died.