Israel pays tribute to Israeli rabbi killed in UAE

The coffin of Israeli-Moldovan rabbi Tzvi Kogan is carried during his funeral in Kfar Chabad, a Chabad-Lubavitch community in central Israel, on November 25, 2024. The 28-year-old UAE-based Chabad Hasidic movement representative was found dead by security services last week in the United Arab Emirates, following what Israeli officials and an ultra-Orthodox Jewish group he was affiliated with called an anti-Semitic attack. (Photo by GIL COHEN-MAGEN / AFP)

JERUSALEM — Israel on Monday held an emotional farewell ceremony for an Israeli rabbi killed in the United Arab Emirates after Emirati authorities said three suspects from Uzbekistan were in custody over his murder.

Tzvi Kogan, a 28-year-old UAE-based rabbi, was found dead by security services last week, following what Israeli officials and an ultra-Orthodox Jewish group he was affiliated with called an anti-Semitic attack.

“How can you already be gone?” his father, Alexander Kogan said during the ceremony in Kfar Chabad, a religious settlement in Israel belonging to the ultra-Orthodox Chabad-Lubavitch movement that Kogan was a part of.

“Tzvi was innocent, and that’s how he arrived in heaven,” his father told hundreds of mourners at the emotionally charged ceremony under heavy rain.

“The whole world is shaken by your murder – they hate us around the world because we are Jews,” David Yosef, the Grand Sephardic Rabbi of Israel, told mourners.

One speaker said three babies had already been named in Kogan’s honor.

Kogan was due to be buried later at the Mount of Olives in Israeli-annexed east Jerusalem.

The United Arab Emirates signed a peace agreement with Israel in 2020 under the US-brokered Abraham Accords.

Kogan’s death was a blow to the tiny Jewish and Israeli communities in the Muslim-majority UAE, which has kept a lower profile since the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza in October 2023.

‘Anti-Semitic attack’

The three suspects were arrested on Sunday, and after “preliminary investigations” the interior ministry identified them in a statement.

“The authorities revealed the identities of the three perpetrators, all of whom are Uzbek nationals,” said the statement published on Monday by the official WAM news agency.

It named them as Olimboy Tohirovich, 28, Makhmudjon Abdurakhim, 28, and Azizbek Kamilovich, 33.

The ministry said authorities were taking “the necessary actions to uncover the details, circumstances, and motives of the crime.”

Kogan was in the UAE as a representative of the Chabad Hasidic movement, which is known for its outreach efforts worldwide.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday condemned “the murder of an Israeli citizen and a Chabad emissary,” calling it “an abhorrent anti-Semitic terrorist attack.”

In Washington, the White House urged accountability for the “horrific crime.”

Neither Emirati nor Israeli officials provided any details about the circumstances of Kogan’s murder.

Israel travel warning

In 2020, the year Israel normalized relations with the UAE, Bahrain, and Morocco, Kogan joined his older brother Reuven and a team of rabbis in the UAE, according to the Chabad-Lubavitch movement.

Chabad said on its website Kogan had managed a kosher supermarket in Dubai, which an AFP photographer said was closed Monday with its window blinds down.

There is no figure for the number of Jews in the UAE, but an Israeli official has told AFP there were about 2,000 Israelis in the Gulf country, with the Jewish community estimated to be up to twice that figure.

The oil-rich Gulf state, whose population is made up mainly of expatriates, opened its first official synagogue within an interfaith center in its capital Abu Dhabi last year to cater to the small but active Jewish community that had previously prayed in private.

Israel renewed a warning for Israelis to avoid any non-essential travel to the UAE and advised citizens already there to take extra precautions.

Moldova’s President Maia Sandu said on X that “we mourn the tragic loss” of Kogan and “strongly condemn this hateful act.”

“Our thoughts are with his family, the Jewish community, and all who grieve,” she said.