The evening haze settled on the glassy waters of the Khor Al Maqta channel in Abu Dhabi.
Yariv and Angela, descendants of prominent rabbinical families in Israel and Lebanon, sat at a weathered teak table watching where the Arabian Gulf pulled in and out of the narrow neck of the channel. Their children’s swimsuits draped over folding beach chairs, drying in the fading sun. A graduated row of sandals, sneakers, and flip-flops lined the edge of the terrace where it dropped off to the sandy shore.
They leaned back in canvas chairs while their preschool-aged children crouched on the cool tile at their feet, assembling a LEGO citadel. The children’s chatter mingled with the murmur of the surf.
The boy’s long curls softened the intensity of his concentration as he snapped blocks into place. While he focused on the complicated details of portals and crenellations, his little sister landscaped the castle with pebbles and seashells. Flushed from a day of sun and salt air, her cropped hair stood up in stiff peaks.
I knelt beside them and helped them build. My friend Reva, who worked with a Jewish NGO, poured hibiscus tea from a sweating pitcher and passed around the glasses.
A ribbon of clove-scented shisha smoke wafted by. Evening prayers rose across the waterway. The setting sun flared and wobbled as it dipped below the horizon. We all settled into the cadence of little waves lapping at the shore—the children intent on their game, the grown-ups at ease, the sky burning tangerine as the desert surrendered the last of its light. We relished a moment so blissful it seemed impossible that anything could intrude.
Until the mobile phones began to buzz.
Three texts came in quick succession. Yariv reached for the phone he’d relegated to the far end of the table. The blood drained from his face. He looked over at Angela. She checked her phone. Terror flooded her eyes. Eight staccato pings hit Reva’s phone. She turned it face up. The screen’s blue light illumined her horror.
Each adult mouthed, “He’s missing.” Then catching themselves, they smiled with rictus grins to keep from alarming the children.
“Look at that tower!” Yariv said to his son with overzealous enthusiasm.
“Those shells you found are so pretty,” Angela said to her daughter. She mouthed to Yariv over the girl’s head, “They found his car.”
More alerts fired in like gunshots.
With a steady voice, betraying no emotion, Reva said, “I’ll go inside and call his wife.”
The boy looked up, wanting to go inside too.
“Oh, will you show me how this works first?” I said, diverting his attention. Without hesitation, he launched into a detailed description of the catapult he’d devised.
Yariv, Angela, and I absorbed each new alert with tightened jaws, rehearsing explanations in our heads in case the children asked questions. They never did.
Our horror and their innocence ran in parallel, two channels that flowed without meeting.
The buzzes came again and again. Eventually even our gallant efforts at deflection flagged in defeat. We ceded to a silence carried on the current of water ebbing and flowing, punctuated by the click of plastic blocks snapping together.
Then the children grew hungry. They wanted watermelon. They wanted to stay up late. We complied, as if granting those small wishes might keep the enormity of our emotions at bay.
Later, we parted company suspended in a fugue-like state dreading the news to come.
By morning, we knew Rabbi Zvi Kogan, twenty-eight years old, Israeli-Moldovan emissary of the Chabad community with a baby on the way, was dead.
For the Jewish community in the Emirates, Kogan was not a distant figure. A daily presence, he ran a kosher grocery store in Dubai. He stocked its narrow aisles with Israeli snacks, kosher meats, jars of olives. He greeted customers with a boyish grin that split his frizzy beard. He spoke with optimism, insisting: “Jewish life here is just beginning.” He carried the quiet determination of one building a future on improbable soil.
Sparse details dribbled out. The silence surrounding his death became its own violence. People filled gaps with speculation. Rumors raced. Most facts never surfaced until the trial of the suspects much later: Kogan, missing for three days. The assailants tracked his movements, kidnapped him and transported him from Dubai to the desert in Al Ain in his own car, heading toward Oman. His car and phone were found abandoned in Al Ain along with signs of a bloody struggle. One suspect was arrested in the Emirates. Three others fled to Türkiye, where Israeli, Emirati and Turkish intelligence cooperated to apprehend a cadre of Uzbek nationals as they got off the plane in Istanbul. Officials extradited the men to Abu Dhabi. Three were sentenced to death, one to life in prison.
Yet the “why” remained unknown. Israeli officials declared it an antisemitic terrorist act. Emirati leaders condemned the killing but revealed little more. Whispers of Iranian involvement floated but were quickly denied.
The question of why left the longest-lasting imprint. Kogan’s execution shattered more than a single life. It ruptured the sense of safety that bound the community together. Its shockwaves spread far beyond the scene itself, wounding the curated image of the United Arab Emirates as a shining hill of safety and tolerance. It left both the local community and the wider nation grappling with the painful fracture of that buoyant vision.
In the wake of the Abraham Accords, Jewish life in the UAE was described in superlatives: the Gulf’s miracle of interfaith exchange. Worship services and Hebrew classes met publicly. Kosher kitchens multiplied. The synagogue at the Abrahamic Family House opened to great fanfare. For a few brief years, Dubai and Abu Dhabi embodied hope. Now these fragile scaffolds of peace teetered. Many worried the progress would come undone in a single night.
“It wasn’t that we didn’t know it could happen,” one community member said, “It’s that we let ourselves believe it wouldn’t.”
And I keep thinking of the boy on the terrace that night. While he never asked or even hinted that he knew what might be going on, a moment arose when his instinct must have detected the truth. As if sensing some destructive force in the air, he crumbled the LEGOs apart, breaking off turrets, dismantling guard walls, decimating the structure. Before long, the pile of bright colored, sharp-edged blocks lay in rubble between my lap and his folded knees.
He looked at the wreckage, then at me and said with a hard stare, “Let’s build something new.”
“Yes, let’s.”
The boy didn’t mourn his demolished fortress. He used the shards of destruction as raw material for what came next. He began building again, certain he could shape the scattered pieces into something that never existed before.
Christine Trainor is an Episcopal priest, writer, and avid explorer of complicated places. After three decades in ministry, including leading the Anglican Church in the Emirate of Abu Dhabi, she dedicates much of her time to writing about the intersections of faith, history, culture, and rapid change in the Middle East and Arabian Gulf regions.