It’s Minchah time on a sticky summer afternoon in Crown Heights Brooklyn as Rabbi Nachman Holtzberg makes his way up to the front of the shul seeking to secure the position of shaliach tzibbur as he’s in the midst of the year of mourning for his mother. As he’s taking his measured steps his ear catches the conversation of a yungerman having a learning session on his cell phone. For some inexplicable reason Rabbi Holtzberg feels connected to the scene.

“Who are you talking to?” Rabbi Holtzberg asks his friend with less tact than is socially acceptable.

“I’m in the middle of a transatlantic phone call with a Jewish prisoner in a jail in India” the man answers.

“In Goa?” Rabbi Holtzberg throws out a wild guess suddenly remembering the story of the incarcerated Israeli. “Is his name Dani?”

His friend more than a little surprised answers in the affirmative.

“Please give me the phone; I want to talk to him” Reb Nachman is promptly handed the phone. “This is the father of Gabi Holtzberg Hy”d” he begins the conversation. He hears a silent sob on the other end of the phone.

It’s around three o’clock in the morning in India and Dani uses the nighttime hours to speak with his Chabadnik friend and learn Chassidus over the telephone. These conversations are what keep him sane within the walls of the foul-smelling suffocating cell where he has been sentenced to spend ten years — nearly four of which have already elapsed.

“How are you Dani?”

Rabbi Holtzberg reconnects to a story he heard about three years before. And he knows that now it’s up to him to bring closure to a chapter begun by his own precious martyred son.

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