from a letter by Hershey Novak, Chabad Campus Rabbi, Washington University St. Louis; a friend, classmate and colleague of Rabbi Gabi Holtzberg:

While the attack was on a Chabad center and a family of Chabad representatives were murdered, the loss is not limited to the Chabad movement. Gabi and Rivky were not targeted because they represented Chabad; Gabi and Rivky were killed for being Jewish. I would go even further to say that this was not only an attack on the Jewish people, but on anyone who values peace, goodness, and kindness.

Read more from Chabad On Campus.

and an opinion piece by Tim Rutten, The Los Angeles Times:

An idea lost on fanatics

There are many facts remaining to be discovered about the atrocities in Mumbai this week, but we already know what we really need to know.

The physical institutions targeted and the individuals singled out for particular attention by the killers — Americans, Britons and Jews — are signatures of the fanatic Islamists we’ve come to know as jihadis. The sites of their attacks may vary — New York, London, Madrid, Nairobi, Mumbai — but the object of their quarrel with history remains the same: modernity…

Finally, there’s the particular tragedy incorporated in the murder of the young American rabbi, Gavriel Holtzberg, his Israeli wife, Rivka, and four others, including a rabbinical colleague. Because we are a people of both faith — peacefully expressed in many creeds — and the future, there is something in the American conscience that recoils with a special horror when violence is done to clergy and the young.