The heart-rending cries of the curly-haired toddler, clutching a toy basketball as he squirmed in the arms of mourners at the Mumbai synagogue ceremony, brought home the extent of the tragedy. In all, 183 people were killed in attacks on 10 targets across the Indian city.

The wrenching scene was played over and over again on Israeli TV stations as plans were made for the funerals of the victims - and for the future of the suddenly orphaned Moshe.

The little boy's murdered parents, Rabbi Gavriel Noach Holtzberg, 29, and Rivka, 28, ran the headquarters of the Chabad Lubavitch movement in Mumbai.

Robert Katz, a New York-based fundraiser for Migdal Ohr, an Israeli orphanage founded by the boy's family, said: "I don't know that he can comprehend or that he will remember seeing his parents shot in cold blood."

Moshe should have happily celebrated his second birthday on Shabbat with his devoted mum and dad.

Instead, his grief-stricken grandparents, Rabbi Shimon and Yehudit Rosenberg, were struggling to find the words to tell him that he would never see his parents again.

Gavriel and Rivka were among six civilians killed at the Chabad centre in the three-day terror siege that ended on Saturday morning. All six were Jewish and four were Israeli.

Little Moshe was spirited out of the centre by Sandra Samuel, a nanny who worked there for years. She found him crying beside his parents' bodies, his pants drenched in blood.

Clutching a blue stuffed animal, he was whisked from the smouldering building.

Sandra had locked herself in a first-floor laundry room when she heard the child's mother screaming: "Sandra, help!"

Then the screaming stopped . . . and it all went quiet.

"He doesn't understand what's going on," Sandra said later. "He is asking for his mother again and again."

Moshe was accompanied on the trip to Israel by his grandparents, who had flown to Mumbai from Tel Aviv on Friday.

Nanny Sandra was on board, too, to provide the grief-dazed child with a familiar face as he starts his new life.

She had told police that after the terrorists overran the six-storey building - Nariman House - "I heard gunshots and loud blasts the whole night. Next morning it was quiet for a while, when I heard the baby crying."

On the floor above, she found Moshe sobbing next to four people lying motionless on the ground. She picked him up and dashed out.

"When the baby emerged with the nanny, he had bloodstains on his clothes," said Benjamin Isaac, secretary of the Indian Jewish Federation. "Thankfully, it wasn't his blood. But we knew someone's blood had already been spilled."

Meanwhile at Kfar Chabad in Israel, Rivka's heartbroken brother Rabbi Shmuel Rosenberg said his sister had gone with courage to undertake a mission in India - opening a Jewish centre in Mumbai.

"She was a strong, industrious and intelligent woman with a nuanced mind - she had no fear and neither did her husband," he said as relatives in Israel prepared for the burials.

Rabbi Rosenberg added: "They were sent on a mission to provide Jewish business people and backpackers with a kosher place to eat, a warm place to visit, put on tefillin, hear a sermon, or receive a blessing from a rabbi."