The small Jewish community in the United Arab Emirates is in shock after the murder in the country of an Israeli-Moldovan rabbi, Zvi Kogan, a religious official told AFP on Monday.
The authorities of this predominantly Muslim country, which prides itself on its security and stability, announced on Sunday the arrest of three suspects for the murder of the 28-year-old rabbi, described by Israel as a terrorist and anti-Semitic act.
On Monday, they clarified that the suspects were of Uzbek nationality, without specifying the circumstances of the murder.
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Elie Abadie, Chief Rabbi of the Emirates, expressed to AFP on Monday the “sadness and shock” of the Jewish community, adding that the law must be applied with “all its rigor” against the perpetrators.
“This tragic and terrorist act of murder of an innocent Jew is an affront to the entire Jewish community and to peaceful coexistence in the UAE,” he said.
Married for six months according to Israeli media, Rabbi Kogan was an emissary of the Chabad Lubavitch movement, aiming to strengthen Jewish identity and bring Jews closer to their faith.
Zvi Kogan, a Chabad supervisor of kosher kitchens in the United Arab Emirates, June 29, 2021. (Lazar Berman/Times of Israel)
The Emirates normalized relations with Israel in 2020, alongside Bahrain and Morocco, under the US-brokered Abraham Accords.
That year, Kogan joined his older brother Reuven and a team of Chabad rabbis in the United Arab Emirates.
According to this movement, the rabbi managed a kosher supermarket in Dubai, opening in 2022.
The Rimon Market, a kosher market managed by Israeli Rabbi Tzvi Kogan, in Dubai, November 25, 2024. (Credit: Giuseppe CACACE / AFP)
There is no official figure on the number of Jews in the UAE, but an Israeli official told AFP that around 2,000 Israelis resided in the country, with the Jewish community estimated at around 4,000 people.
This murder particularly affects the Israeli community, whose members remain discreet as regional tensions are exasperated by the war in Gaza, triggered by the pogrom perpetrated by the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas on October 7, 2023 in southern Israel.
Emirates presidential adviser Anwar Gargash stressed on Sunday that the country remained “an oasis of stability, a society of tolerance and coexistence”, in a message published on the social network X, without making a direct reference to the murder of the rabbi .
In 2022, the Emirates opened its first official synagogue within an interfaith center in Abu Dhabi to meet the needs of the local Jewish community, although small in number.
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