Israel will grant citizenship to the Indian woman who saved the life of a 2-year-old boy whose parents were murdered in the terrorist attack on the Chabad House in Mumbai in November 2008.

Rabbi Gavriel Holztberg and his wife Rivka, the Chabad movement's envoys to Mumbai, were among six people killed when Islamist terrorists attacked the movement's headquarters. After a two-day standoff, four Israelis, an American Jew and a Mexican Jewish woman were dead.

Open gallery view Sandra Samuel, the Indian woman who saved Moshe Holtzberg in the Chabad Mumbai attack Credit: CNN

Their son Moshe was saved because his Indian nanny, Sandra Samuel, managed to orchestrate their escape from the besieged house.



Samuel came back to Israel with Moshe following the attack, where she continued to care for him at his grandparents' home in Afula.

Interior Minister Eli Yishai called the decision to grant Samuel citizenship a humanitarian step that must be taken for somebody who saves a Jewish life.

During the siege of the Chabad House, Samuel had locked herself in a laundry room when she heard Moshe's mother Rivka screaming, 'Sandra help!' "Then the screaming stopped, and it was quiet," said Robert Katz, a New York-based fund-raiser for an Israeli orphanage founded by the boy's family.

She cracked open the door of her hiding place and saw a deserted staircase. She ran up one flight and saw the rabbi and his wife, covered in blood and shot to death. She snatched the crying boy, bolted down the stairs and out of the building.

"She's been there with him throughout," Katz said.

Though Samuel had no passport or papers, Moshe's grand-uncle, Rabbi Yitzchak David Grossman, helped arrange for her to get a visa to Israel.

The terrorists struck ten different locations across Mumbai, in attacks that left 166 people dead and hundreds wounded, while many were taken hostage.