(RNS) — Even as thousands of rabbis affiliated with the Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidic sect crowded into a group photograph at their annual conference in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights neighborhood, the absence of one of their colleagues was palpable.
Rabbi Zvi Kogan, an emissary of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement, was murdered last week in an apparent antisemitic attack in the United Arab Emirates. He was laid to rest last Monday (Nov. 25) in Israel.
Three Uzbek nationals, allegedly linked to an Iranian-backed terror cell, were arrested shortly after disembarking from a plane in Turkey and deported back to the UAE as the primary suspects in Kogan’s murder. If convicted they could face the death penalty.
Iran, which has denied any involvement in the killing, has long been accused of targeting prominent Jewish and Israeli figures abroad, including the 1994 bombing of the AMIA Jewish center in Buenos Aires and a 2022 plot to target Israeli tourists in Istanbul, which both Israeli and Turkish officials pinned on Iran.
The attack was grieved by Jews around the world, but most of all by the rabbis affiliated with the Chabad Hasidic sect, which has made a name for itself sending its emissaries — known in Hebrew as shliachs or shluchim — wherever Jews may be and providing them with the necessities of Jewish life.
Rabbi Zvi Kogan. (Photo courtesy Chabad.org)
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