(RNS) — At the same time as 1000’s of rabbis affiliated with the Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidic sect crowded into a bunch {photograph} at their annual convention in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights neighborhood, the absence of certainly one of their colleagues was palpable.
Rabbi Zvi Kogan, an emissary of the Chabad-Lubavitch motion, was murdered final week in an obvious antisemitic assault within the United Arab Emirates. He was laid to relaxation final Monday (Nov. 25) in Israel.
Three Uzbek nationals, allegedly linked to an Iranian-backed terror cell, have been arrested shortly after disembarking from a airplane in Turkey and deported again to the UAE as the first suspects in Kogan’s homicide. If convicted they might face the demise penalty.
Iran, which has denied any involvement within the killing, has lengthy been accused of focusing on distinguished Jewish and Israeli figures overseas, together with the 1994 bombing of the AMIA Jewish heart in Buenos Aires and a 2022 plot to goal Israeli vacationers in Istanbul, which each Israeli and Turkish officers pinned on Iran.
The assault was grieved by Jews all over the world, however most of all by the rabbis affiliated with the Chabad Hasidic sect, which has made a reputation for itself sending its emissaries — recognized in Hebrew as shliachs or shluchim — wherever Jews could also be and offering them with the requirements of Jewish life.
Rabbi Zvi Kogan. (Photograph courtesy Chabad.org)
Hundreds of rabbis affiliated with the motion gathered final weekend in Crown Heights, its non secular heart, for his or her annual convention, generally known as the Kinus, a practice begun in 1983 by the motion’s late chief, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, remembered by most easily as “the Rebbe.”
However the tone was defiant this weekend, stressing that the assault wouldn’t sway them from their mission, within the UAE or elsewhere on the earth.
“This Kinus comes at a time of acute ache and immense loss. Simply final week, we tragically misplaced certainly one of our brothers, Rabbi Zvi Kogan, a faithful shliach in Dubai. Kogan devoted his life to increasing Jewish life within the Gulf, and his stunning homicide has left a deep void. It’s at moments like these that we have to come collectively, strengthen one another, and recommit to our mission,” Rabbi Mendy Kotlarsky mentioned in his deal with opening the convention Thursday (Nov. 28).
“This previous week, the world witnessed the lifetime of a shliach via the tragic lens of Rabbi Kogan’s homicide. Leaders throughout communities have reached out, expressing a shared sense of loss. It’s now our duty to channel that ache into motion — recommitting ourselves to the mission of bringing mild, mitzvot and connection to each nook of the world,” he continued.
The convention’s Sunday evening gala started with a video tribute to Kogan. “You’d see Zvi’s particular care for each single shliach, for each single individual,” mentioned Levi Duchman, Chabad’s head rabbi within the UAE, whom Kogan had come to help. Because the signing of the Abraham Accords in 2020, which normalized relations between Israel and UAE, Israelis and Jews from all over the world have been flocking to the Gulf Arab state for each tourism and enterprise, with many organising there completely.
Synagogues, Jewish day faculties, kosher eating places and markets — certainly one of which Kogan managed — have been established for the rising Jewish group. Chabad’s presence had grown to seven rabbinic households — together with the Kogans.
Rabbis take part in a second of silence on the Gala Banquet throughout the Convention of Chabad-Lubavitch Emissaries on the New Jersey Conference and Exposition Middle in Edison, N.J., Sunday, Dec. 1, 2024. (Photograph © Shmulie Grossbaum/Chabad.org)
After a century of decline of historical Jewish communities within the Arab world, from Morocco to Yemen and Iraq, the UAE’s inhabitants had been hailed as a historic improvement.
Kogan’s homicide just isn’t the primary time Chabad’s emissaries have been focused over geopolitical points. In 2013, a Chabad rabbi in Derbent, the capital of Russia’s Muslim-majority Dagestan area, was gunned down in his dwelling.
In 2008 a Pakistani terror group linked to Al-Qaeda launched an assault on websites round Mumbai, India, together with the town’s Chabad home. The assailants held hostage and finally murdered Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg and his spouse. The Holtzbergs’ niece, Rivky, was married to Kogan.
The violence has not deterred Chabad. “That is what the Rebbe injected in us,” mentioned Rabbi Israel Kozlovsky, who changed the Holtzbergs in Mumbai a couple of years after the 2008 assault. “In a time of tragedy, we won’t go to the apparent, which is to shut down or to decelerate, to ponder on the sorrows, however we’ll bounce again and can return, not solely to full swing, but additionally to rather more than what we have been earlier than.”
Rabbi Motti Seligson, a spokesman for Chabad-Lubavitch, advised RNS that he’s getting questions on Chabad abandoning the Gulf states. “That’s not how Chabad responds to those issues,” he mentioned. “When there’s adversity and there’s darkness, the response is to deliver an immense quantity of sunshine to bear and construct again stronger. That’s what we’re doing within the UAE.”
It’s some extent Duchman emphasised within the tribute to Kogan, which opened the gala Sunday evening. “One factor I knew because the Rebbe’s shliach, once I obtained the devastating information that certainly one of our shluchim was misplaced and was murdered in chilly blood, was that our response may solely be a method. To develop much more, to deliver extra shluchim, to deliver extra yiddishkeit (Jewishness) to the UAE,” Duchman mentioned.
A rabbi delivers a eulogy subsequent to the coffin containing the stays of Israeli-Moldovan rabbi Zvi Kogan in Kfar Chabad, Israel, Nov. 25, 2024. Kogan, 28, an ultra-Orthodox rabbi, was killed final week in Dubai, the place he ran a kosher grocery retailer. (AP Photograph/Ohad Zwigenberg)
Seligson pressured that whereas the assault within the UAE was a shock, it’s not the one issue the motion’s rabbis have confronted this yr.
“It’s been a yr of tragedies, with warfare in Israel, or for different rabbis in Ukraine who’ve witnessed tragedy of their communities,” Seligson mentioned. In September, the son of Rabbi Reuven Moshe Azman, a chabad emissary and chief rabbi of Ukraine, was killed on the entrance strains within the warfare with Russia.
However Chabad’s resilience doesn’t imply the broader motion is unaffected. Assaults on rabbis inevitably include new safety directives, which may be disheartening for a motion that prides itself on its openness and welcoming angle — and one funded by donations.
“It’s a double-edged sword. On one aspect we’re rising our actions, however on the opposite now we have to be extra alert,” mentioned Kozlovsky. “To make an actual change in safety that’s not simply beauty, you must make investments. We’re a company that, like another group, runs on donations, so we at all times have to guage what’s extra vital: educating the (Hebrew) alphabet to this little little one who by no means bought a Jewish schooling or to put in one other digital camera.”
Nonetheless, after this weekend’s convention, the rabbis have been resolved.
“The Talmud says that the Jews are thought of like olives, an olive is an everyday fruit, however solely when it’s crushed do its finest points come out,” mentioned Kozlovsky.
