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‘Now it’s our turn to support him’: Crowds throng funeral of Israeli-American man killed in West Bank
RA’ANANA, Israel (JTA) — Recurring bouts of laughter were some of the most remarkable moments of the funeral of Elan Ganeles, the 27-year-old Jewish American from West Hartford, Connecticut, who was shot dead this week when driving through the West Bank.
Descriptions of an incredibly kind, open minded, funny, brilliant and humble young man came in sharp contrast to calls by the official representative of the Israeli government at the funeral to avenge the death of those who harm Jews in the Land of Israel.
“No one will raise a hand against a Jew in the Land of Israel,” said the representative, Rabbi Michael Eliyahu, who serves as Israel’s minister of heritage and is a member of the far-right Jewish Power party.
The contrast played out throughout the funeral, attended by nearly a thousand people in Ra’anana, a suburb of Tel Aviv.
Friends and family members remembered Elan as a caring and unique individual who brought joy to their lives, while those who did not know the recent Columbia University graduate, who was in Israel for a friend’s wedding, framed his heartbreaking story as the latest tragedy in Israel’s decades-old conflict with the Palestinians.
As Ganeles’ brothers and friends took turns, standing before his body wrapped in a shroud and laid out before them, they alternately choked up and laughed as they told stories about his love for learning and, for his friends, his disarming frankness and his “annoyingness.”
Mourners surround the grave of Elan Ganeles, killed Feb. 27 in the West Bank, at his funeral in Raanana, March 1, 2023. (Orly Halpern)
“Elan was intelligent, curious, goofy, idiosyncratic – and most famously lovably annoying,” said Akiva Raklin, a close friend of Elan, who knew him “since birth,” as people laughed aloud. “I know calling someone annoying at their funeral is a little less than traditional, but Elan was the only person on the face of the earth for whom this characteristic was absolutely positive in every way.”
Ganeles, recalled Raklin, would pose “intrusive questions” to his closest friends, making them “blush and cringe,” but they all saw his behavior for what it was: an expression of closeness and caring. “With every comment he made, no matter how irritating it was or how uncomfortable it would make someone, it would just make them closer to him,” he said, sparking chuckles and laughs from those who clearly knew him well.
Some of Ganeles’s friends came from abroad to attend the funeral, as did his family’s rabbi from Young Israel of West Hartford, who accompanied his physician parents on their trip to Israel.
“Elan was the ultimate friend,” said Ari Zaken, his roommate from New York, recounting a conversation they had in which Ganeles pulled out a list of over 100 close friends he made sure to keep in touch with.
Ganeles, an avid learner, traveler and birdwatcher, lived a life packed with knowledge and friends.
“He completed two majors in college, only one of which he planned to use, just because he loved to learn,” said his younger brother, Gabe. “He worked two jobs simply because he had so much interest in what he could learn from both. He was our resident expert in geography, history, travel, birds. He loved trivia and made trivia games for family and friends and he was able to finish the hardest crosswords in record time.”
Gabe ended his eulogy, breaking down in sobs: “Elan was my brother, my best friend and a huge inspiration to me. And I will miss him,”
On Monday, Elan dropped Gabe off at a train station in the north and then made his way south on Route 90, which passes through the length of the West Bank, alongside the border with Jordan, on his way to attend a friend’s wedding in Jerusalem that night. On the road that goes around the city of Jericho, he was shot by a Palestinian gunman.
“I was so lucky that I got to spend the last week of his life with him,” said Gabe, recalling their trips through historical sites in Israel in the past week. ”He used his unique skill of complete unabashedness to bring people together at every chance he got,” said Gabe. “Despite his brashness, Elan was the most thoughtful person I know.”
The Ganeles family tried to avoid turning his funeral into a political event and reportedly requested TV networks not to attend the ceremony. “He’s a friend of ours, not just another victim,” said Jamie Landau, 27, who went to a five-month ulpan in August 2015 with Elan Ganeles on kibbutz Sde Eliyahu. Afterwards, both joined the Israeli army. Elan served in the Mofet Unit as a computer programmer, working on soldiers’ salaries.
Nevertheless, Heritage Minister Michael Eliyahu had a clear message: “I tell you as a minister in the state of Israel … I say, ‘we failed’ and we need to do everything so that won’t happen.” The newly appointed cabinet minister went on to call for revenge following Elan’s murder. “It’s not acceptable that a Jew who comes to this country will be scared to be here,” Eliyahu said. “And if we do have haters, may God avenge their blood and we will avenge their blood.”
As the funeral was being held, Israeli forces raided a Palestinian refugee camp adjacent to the city of Jericho, not far from where Ganeles was killed, and apprehended four Palestinians, one of them suspected of carrying out the shooting attack that killed Ganeles and the other of assisting him. Another Palestinian was killed during the raid.
People pack the funeral of Elan Ganeles, who was killed in a shooting attack in the West Bank, in (Flash90)
Hundreds of people attended the funeral, filling Ra’anana’s old cemetery to the brim. More watched from outside the cemetery walls, listening to a live feed of the eulogies on each others’ cell phones. The majority were religious and did not know Ganeles, showing up out of a sense of duty and a wish to pay respect to the slain Jewish American visiting Israel. Some marched in with large Israeli flags, giving the private funeral ceremony an air of a national event.
Elan Ganeles was raised in a Modern Orthodox family in Connecticut and attended yeshiva in Israel after graduating from high school. He then decided to stay in Israel and served for two years in the IDF before returning to the United States to attend college.
Liora Lutrin, a 15-year-old student from Amit Rananim religious girls’ high school, who made aliyah a year and a half ago, stood with her classmates singing “Our brothers of all of the House of Israel.”
“We came with our school to show respect,” said Lutrin, who had five earrings in her right ear and wore a gray T-shirt and an above-the-knee black skirt. “He sacrificed his life to come here and be a soldier in Israel and even though he didn’t die as a soldier, he supported our country and now it’s our turn to support him.”
Or Cohen, a 25-year-old student wearing sandals, who came during a lunch break from his yeshiva in Ramat Gan, said it “was the least I could do.” Cohen, originally from Otniel settlement, said, “I heard he’s a new immigrant, someone whose parents don’t live here. I came in identification with the pain of the people, to show respect for my brother, who was murdered. This is bigger than us.”
After the funeral ended, dozens of people lingered near the grave.
After the funeral of Elan Ganeles in Ra’anana, Israel, friends loitered by the grave while a beggar, a common presence at Israeli funerals, sat nearby. (Orly Halpern)
Joining them was Mordechai Goldberg, a 70-year-old religious beggar with a stained white shirt and a cheap black suit jacket, who arrived from Jerusalem to attend and to panhandle at the cemetery, a common sight in Israeli cemeteries. Goldberg entered the circle of people around his grave and began saying the Kaddish prayer. The crowd automatically answered with ‘Amen.’ When the prayer ended, he began calling for the death of Arabs. “We will all pray to God that all of the Arabs die under our feet, now,” said Goldberg as some of the people responded with ‘Amen,’ while others remained baffled by the call.
“I don’t think that would represent Elan’s opinions,” said a young religious woman with an American accent, whose eyes were red from crying, and whose brother was another of Elan’s ‘best friends.’ “He wasn’t like that,” she said.
Indeed, Elan’s uncle, Dov Ganeles told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that Elan marveled over his uncle’s friendship with an Arab colleague.
“He thought it was lovely that such a relationship could exist and be normal,” said Dov Ganeles. “He was proud of that, that that relationship could exist. It was something to cherish.”
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The post ‘Now it’s our turn to support him’: Crowds throng funeral of Israeli-American man killed in West Bank appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Meet the TikToker trying to revive Judeo-Arabic, the nearly extinct language Jews once spoke across the Arab world
In TikTok videos viewed tens of thousands of times, 31-year-old Dan Sheena dons a blond wig and acts out skits of a bickering Iraqi couple in a language that is nearly extinct: Judeo-Arabic.
Sheena began posting videos on TikTok in 2023, speaking the endangered language, which today is rarely spoken by anyone under the age of 60, following the mass exodus of Jews from Arab countries due to discrimination and religious persecution.
Raised by two parents from Baghdad, Sheena grew up in Israel and spoke the language at home. That’s a rarity among second- and third-generation Iraqi Jews, whose families often stopped passing it down in an effort to assimilate.
From a young age, Sheena, who still lives in Israel, knew he wanted to become an Arabic teacher. After years of teaching conversational Arabic in the public school system, he became determined to preserve the dialect he grew up with.
When Sheena told his family that he wanted to teach Judeo-Arabic, they urged him to focus on a more practical dialect. “They told me, ‘Oh, you are stupid. Why do you want to do that? No one wants to learn it. It’s going to die.’”
Despite their concerns, the initial response to his account and the Judeo-Arabic Zoom lessons he offered was overwhelming. “Many people registered. They told me, ‘Dan, this is my dream. I heard my parents speaking in Judeo Arabic, and I really want to learn it. And I finally have the opportunity.’”
He said that, for him, social media has been essential to his efforts to preserve the language. “Many people forward my videos between themselves” and “ask their parents about certain words,” he said. “This is the way to talk about Judeo-Arabic, to keep it alive. Social media lets me do that, not in the classic way of writing a book and trying to spread it and share it. This is the old way of keeping a language alive.”
In videos, he uses classic Baghdadi Judeo-Arabic phrases, including in equal measure cheeky insults like Wakka mazzalem (“may their luck run out”), and compliments like Asht eedak (“may your hands be blessed”), a phrase used to compliment someone’s cooking or hosting abilities.
Sheena has since built a TikTok following of more than 100,000 and teaches dozens of students around the world, who find him through social media, through Zoom-based courses each year.
A disappearing language
In the 1940s, nearly 1 million Jews lived across the Arab world. Today, an estimated 4,000 remain. In Iraq, where there was once a thriving Jewish community of around 120,000, just three Jews are believed to still live in the country.
Judeo-Arabic, a variety of different dialects of Arabic that were spoken by Jews in the Arab world, endured in active use for roughly 1,250 years. Since the mid-20th century, when Jews were forced to flee the region en masse, the language has been in rapid decline.
According to Assaf Bar Moshe, one of the world’s few Judeo-Arabic experts, Jews in the Middle East were usually bilingual. “They spoke one dialect with their community and families, and another dialect the moment they stepped out of their house,” to be able to communicate with their non-Jewish neighbors. A key feature of the language is words borrowed from Hebrew and Aramaic, especially for religious objects or distinctly Jewish words.
Bar Moshe said today, there are around 6,000 native speakers of the Judeo-Baghdadi Arabic dialect worldwide. That dialect, he said, offers a glimpse into what the Arab world sounded like centuries ago. “Baghdadi Judeo-Arabic is actually the original dialect of Baghdad from the Middle Ages. The Jewish community preserved it, while the Muslim dialect came later with migrations in the 17th century. That’s why they are so different.”
Over the centuries, Jews in each country developed their own dialect, often with additional regional variation. While the spoken language is extremely varied depending on where it was developed, the written language became much more standardized, with Arabic transliterated into Hebrew script, similar to Yiddish or Ladino.
When Jews left the Arab world, most fleeing to Israel, the U.S., the U.K. and Canada, they commonly abandoned the language as they tried to integrate into new societies. In Israel, Bar Moshe said, “Arabic was seen as the language of the enemy, so children were embarrassed to speak it.”
There was a similar pressure to assimilate for Jews who fled to other countries. “We wanted to be British,” said Vicky Sweiry Tsur, a Bahraini Jew who grew up in the U.K. and now lives in California. “I used to feel very embarrassed when my friends heard my parents speak Arabic. And you know, slowly, slowly, if you don’t use it, you lose it.”
According to Sheena, many students come to him with a sense of regret for turning away from the language when they were younger.
“If we just listened to my mom way back then, you know, I wouldn’t be chasing after every word and phrase that I can possibly remember now,” said Sweiry Tsur. “What I wouldn’t give to go back.”
‘You learn it from your heart’
Sheena admits his parents had reason to protest his decision to delve into Judeo-Arabic. Students come to him all the time debating whether they should learn conversational Arabic or Judeo-Arabic, which, by most measures, cannot be revived and has no practical use outside of the shrinking circle of elderly individuals who still speak it. “I always answer, to learn the spoken Arabic, you do it from your brain because you want to use it daily. But the Judeo-Arabic, you don’t learn from your brain. You learn it from your heart.”
Sheena’s student Jason Mashal, 36, whose parents were born in Iraq, said he is learning the language out of a desire to preserve it. “I don’t even want to learn Modern Standard Arabic,” he said. “My motivation has always been that this is a dying language, and I guess I’m probably going to fail to save it, but I’m still going to try, you know, to be as functional as I can.”
Inspired by his progress, Mashal later traveled to Iraq, visiting the school his parents attended (where current students had no idea it used to be a school for Jews), the only synagogue left in Baghdad, and even a nightclub his father used to frequent. “It was a very magical and electric feeling to walk through those halls in the precise place where I know both my parents went to school many years ago. Speaking Jewish Arabic in Iraq was just as electric.”
For many of Sheena’s students, the language offers a way to reconnect with memories they can no longer access. “People say to me, ‘Dan, I want to smell again my grandmother. I can’t sit with her and listen to her stories again, but I can hear her by these words by this language.’”
“He comes out with a word or a phrase that literally I can say I have not heard for like, 40 or 50 years,” said Sweiry Tsur. “There’s no way I would have been able to bring it out from the depths of my brain, but then you hear it, and you know exactly what it means, and exactly in what context you would use it — and all the emotions that are tied to it, you know, Friday night dinners with all of the family.”
The post Meet the TikToker trying to revive Judeo-Arabic, the nearly extinct language Jews once spoke across the Arab world appeared first on The Forward.
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Iran’s President Says Immediate Cessation of US-Israeli Aggression Needed to End War
Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian attends the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) Summit 2025, in Tianjin, China, September 1, 2025. Iran’s Presidential website/WANA (West Asia News Agency)/Handout via REUTERS
Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian said on Saturday that there needs to be an “immediate cessation” of what he described as US-Israeli aggression to end the war and wider regional conflict, Iran’s embassy in India said in an X post on Saturday.
Pezeshkian spoke with India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi by phone earlier in the day.
Pezeshkian told Modi that there should be guarantees to prevent a recurrence of such “aggression” in the future. He also called on the BRICS bloc of major emerging economies to play an independent role in halting aggression against Iran.
The Iranian president proposed a regional security framework comprising West Asian countries to ensure peace without foreign interference, according to the country’s embassy in India.
In a separate post on X earlier on Saturday, Modi said he condemned attacks on critical infrastructure in the Middle East in the discussion with Pezeshkian.
The Indian Prime Minister further reiterated the importance of safeguarding freedom of navigation and ensuring shipping lanes remain open and secure.
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Trump’s Peace Board Hands Hamas Disarmament Proposal, Sources Say
US President Donald Trump, Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and US Special Envoy Steve Witkoff attend the inaugural Board of Peace meeting at the US Institute of Peace in Washington, D.C., U.S., February 19, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque
Donald Trump’s Board of Peace has presented Hamas with a written proposal on how it could lay down its weapons, two sources said, a step the Palestinian terrorists have thus far refused to take as the US president pushes on with his plan for Gaza’s future.
The proposal, first reported by NPR, was submitted to Hamas during meetings in Cairo over the past week, one of the sources said. The talks were attended by Nickolay Mladenov and Aryeh Lightstone, the two sources familiar with the matter said.
Mladenov is the Trump-appointed Board of Peace envoy to Gaza. Lightstone is a US aide to Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff.
Trump’s Gaza plan, to which Israel and Hamas agreed in October, sees Israeli troops withdrawing from Gaza and reconstruction starting as Hamas lays down its weapons.
Mladenov on Thursday said that serious efforts were underway to bring relief to war-torn Gaza, with a framework agreed by the mediators that could advance reconstruction in the enclave, much of which lies in ruins.
“It is now on the table. It requires one clear choice: full decommissioning by Hamas and every armed group, with no exceptions and no carve-outs. In this season of hope, may those responsible make the right choice for the Palestinian people,” Mladenov said on X in a post for the Muslim holiday Eid al-Fitr.
Representatives of Hamas were not immediately available for comment on Saturday, the second day of the holiday. Talks on disarmament had been placed on hold at the start of the US-Israeli war on Iran which began on February 28.
AMNESTY OFFER MAY BE ON THE TABLE
US officials have said that Iran-backed Hamas could be offered amnesty in any deal under which they agree to lay down any heavy weaponry and light arms including rifles.
Sources close to Hamas say the group would likely refuse to give up their rifles for fear of attacks by rival militias in Gaza, some of which have backing from Israel. Hamas and its rivals have staged deadly attacks on one another since the October ceasefire.
One of the sources said much would depend on what is acceptable to Israel, which demands the group’s complete disarmament.
Some of Hamas’ prominent officials have outright rejected any disarmament over the past few months.
Israel has shown no sign of withdrawing its troops who are in control of around half of Gaza’s territory, with Hamas keeping a firm grip on the other half of the enclave and its two million population, most of which has been rendered homeless by two years of devastating war.
The source said that amnesty and targeted investments in Gaza were being offered as incentives for Hamas, but said that it was unclear whether the Board of Peace would have funds to pay for it.
Trump garnered some $7 billion in pledges in February from countries, including some in the Gulf, before those same countries came under attack by Iran in a widening Middle East war.
The source said that only a small amount of those pledged funds had actually been provided, without specifying sums.