This weekend, Jewish communities in the Land of Israel, the United Arab Emirates, and around the world will mark the second yahrzeit of Rabbi Zvi Kogan, the 28-year-old Chabad-Lubavitch emissary who was abducted and murdered by terrorists in Dubai on November 21, 2024. His yahrzeit, 20 Cheshvan, falls out this year on Shabbat, October 31.
Kogan arrived in the Emirates in 2020 and spent the next four years helping to establish and expand Jewish life in the Gulf state, with particular attention to the young Jewish community’s kosher infrastructure. He managed Dubai’s Rimon kosher supermarket, and with his wife, Rivky, ran classes and programs in Abu Dhabi and Dubai.
In the two years since his murder, projects begun in his memory have spread from the Gulf to Israel and the United States.
From Ramat Shlomo to the Gulf
Zvi Kogan was born on the 26th of Av, August 11, 1996, in the Ramat Shlomo neighborhood of Jerusalem. His family traces its lineage to Rabbi Yisrael Baal Shem Tov, founder of the Chassidic movement, and to Rabbi Shabtai Cohen, the famed 17th-century commentator on Jewish law known as the Shach.
At 20, he began traveling to assist Jewish communities abroad, teaching children at the Torat Chaim yeshivah in Moscow and in the Yad Israel institutions of the Karlin-Stolin Chassidic group in Pinsk, Belarus. Later, in Paphos, Cyprus, Kogan helped establish a Chabad center for Israeli tourists, with prayer services, Shabbat and holiday meals, classes, a restaurant and a kosher grocery, while in Odessa, Ukraine, he set up a booth at the airport where Jewish travelers could put on tefillin and find kosher food.
An Israeli citizen, Kogan enlisted in the Israel Defense Forces when he was 22. He was first assigned to logistics, then asked to transfer to a combat unit, and served in the Tomer battalion of the Givati Brigade.
After the signing of the Abraham Accords in 2020, Kogan moved to Dubai to work with Rabbi Levi Duchman, director of Chabad of the UAE. He helped build the country’s kosher system from its foundations, overseeing supervision and training for restaurants, hotels and food factories. He married Rivky Spielman in 2022, and together they settled in the UAE to serve the community.
Zechariah Daniel and his wife often brought their children to the Kogans’ Shabbat table. He remembers sitting with Kogan late one night after dinner, not long after the young rabbi had arrived. Kogan told him that he wanted the Jews of the Emirates to have everything they needed to live a kosher life.
‘Achi, That Was Crazy’
Fanny Cohen-Ruben and her family arrived in Abu Dhabi in September 2022, and met Kogan shortly thereafter. He introduced her to people who could help their business, and was a friendly face at every community event, prayer service and children’s program, and made ordering kosher food simple. The last time they spoke, he told her with some pride that he had sung the Sephardic selichot on Yom Kippur, though he was Ashkenazi.
“He just showed us as a model [of] how he behaves with generosity, kindness. We all wanted to be like him,” she later wrote. “His aim was to make you feel comfortable. His smile, his joy of life, his optimism and positivity will remain forever.”
Chaim Heber met Kogan in 2020, after both of them had joined the Chabad team in the UAE, and the two later shared an apartment. Heber remembers a man whose energy could change the mood of a room, and who would often say, in his Israeli accent, “Achi, that was crazy.”
When Heber moved back to the Emirates, Kogan met him at the airport, carried his luggage, arranged a car and took him on his first kosher shopping trip. The store’s non-Jewish staff called Kogan “Rabbi Steve.” He found time to affix mezuzahs, visit the sick and help customers put on tefillin.
“He was a holy, larger-than-life person whom I will never forget,” says Heber.
Hannah and Nick Beaton met him only a few times. New to the UAE, they shopped at Rimon every week, and once asked whether the store carried chopped liver, a dish they missed from home. Kogan offered to make some for them himself.
“He was so warm and welcoming. Like family,” she remembered.
Tefillin, Torah Scrolls and Mitzvot
Many of the projects dedicated to Kogan were inspired by the mitzvot he encouraged others to perform each day.
One program, Zvi’s Tefillin, began with Avi Batito, an Israeli real estate developer. Late in 2020, Kogan found Batito sitting alone in a Dubai hotel and helped him put on tefillin. This soon led to a warm friendship. Batito went on to fund tefillin kits for about 60 stations in Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Ras Al Khaimah, and more kits were sent to other stations in the Gulf that are home to small Jewish communities. Each bag is embroidered with the words “ZVI’S TEFILLIN” and carries an AirTag, so that it can be tracked as it passes from hand to hand. At the launch, 60 men put on tefillin together, and community members pledged and paid for another 50 pairs.
A separate gift of 18 pairs was donated in his memory, one of which will remain permanently at Rimon, the store where he worked and from which he was taken. In Israel, friends and admirers organized Thirty for Light, which is funding 30 new tefillin stands around the country and 30 pairs of tefillin for emissaries and volunteers.
The writing of a Torah scroll for the UAE began during the shiva at the Kogan family home, in the presence of Israeli President Isaac Herzog. The scroll was later dedicated in the room of the Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson, of righteous memory, at 770 Eastern Parkway during the 2025 International Conference of Chabad-Lubavitch Emissaries. A second scroll was dedicated on Chanukah at the Scheiner family’s synagogue in Monsey, N.Y., and more than 850 friends and relatives have joined in sponsoring a Torah in his name.
A youth center in Kogan’s memory has opened in Miami, and a Tesla Cybertruck outfitted as a mitzvah mobile is planned to tour all 50 U.S. states. More than 40,000 mitzvahs, from lighting Shabbat candles to affixing mezuzahs and giving charity, have been pledged in his memory.
May the soul of Rabbi Zvi Hakohen ben Rabbi Alexander Sender Kogan be bound up in the bond of life.
