How the killing of a rabbi in Dubai upended a community that thought it was safe

livemint.com:

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. DUBAI—The morning of Nov. 21, Rabbi Zvi Kogan left his home with no signs that anything was wrong.

He hopped in his car, swung by the kosher grocery store in Dubai where he worked and exchanged texts with a friend he planned to spend the weekend with, telling him “sababa," Hebrew slang for “cool." Then he disappeared. Kogan never showed up for a dental appointment he had scheduled for the afternoon, people aware of his movements said. His wife, Rivky, worried, alerted the Jewish group he represented in the United Arab Emirates, Chabad, which contacted the authorities.

By then, kidnappers had snatched the religious leader and were driving him toward neighboring Oman, according to a person familiar with the investigation into his death. Something disrupted that plan, and Emirati authorities later found Kogan’s dead body and car inside the U.A.E. near the border.

Kogan’s friends and family told The Wall Street Journal it was a bloody end, though the exact circumstances around his death remain unclear. The killing has shaken the small community of Jews who set up in the Gulf state in the wake of the Abraham Accords brokered during Donald Trump’s first term as president and which normalized relations between Israel and the U.A.E. and three other countries.

It is the first new Jewish community to be established in the Arab world since waves of native Jews were expelled in the decades following the establishment of the state of Israel. With the blessing of local authorities, Jews established flourishing prayer communities, including at a top hotel on Dubai’s luxury Palm-shaped island, and attracted celebrity rabbis, local families, and visiting tourists. The events sometimes hosted hundreds