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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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Board of Peace Members Have Pledged More Than $5 billion for Gaza, Trump Says
A drone view shows the destruction in a residential neighborhood, after the withdrawal of the Israeli forces from the area, amid a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, in Gaza City, October 21, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Dawoud Abu Alkas/File Photo
US President Donald Trump said Board of Peace member states will announce at an upcoming meeting on Thursday a pledge of more than $5 billion for reconstruction and humanitarian efforts in Gaza.
In a post on Truth Social on Sunday, Trump wrote that member states have also committed thousands of personnel toward a U.N.-authorized stabilization force and local police in the Palestinian enclave.
The US president said Thursday’s gathering, the first official meeting of the group, will take place at the Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace, which the State Department recently renamed after the president. Delegations from more than 20 countries, including heads of state, are expected to attend.
The board’s creation was endorsed by a United Nations Security Council resolution as part of the Trump administration’s plan to end the war between Israel and Palestinian Islamist group Hamas in Gaza.
Israel and Hamas agreed to the plan last year with a ceasefire officially taking effect in October, although both sides have accused each other repeatedly of violating the ceasefire. According to Gaza’s Health Ministry, more than 590 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli troops in the territory since the ceasefire began. Israel has said four of its soldiers have been killed by Palestinian militants in the same period.
While regional Middle East powers including Turkey, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Israel – as well as emerging nations such as Indonesia – have joined the board, global powers and traditional Western US allies have been more cautious.
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Why a forgotten teacher’s grave became a Jewish pilgrimage site
Along Britton Road in Rochester, New York, a brick gatehouse sits across from ordinary homes. Beyond it lies Britton Road Cemetery, its grounds divided into family plots and sections claimed over time by Orthodox congregations and fraternal associations, past and present. Names like Anshe Polen, Beth Hakneses Hachodosh, B’nai Israel, and various Jewish fraternal organizations are found here.
On the east side of the cemetery, a modest gray headstone draws visitors who do not personally know the man buried there, who were never taught his name in school, and who claim no personal connection to his life. Some leave notes. Some light candles in a small metal box set nearby. Others whisper prayers and stand for a moment before going. They come because they believe holiness can be found here.
The grave belongs to Rabbi Yechiel Meir Burgeman, a Polish-born teacher who died in 1938. He did not lead a major congregation or leave behind an institution that bears his name. And yet, nearly a century after his death, people still visit.
Over time, Burgeman has come to be remembered as a tzaddik nistar, a hidden righteous person, whose holiness is known through their teaching and daily life rather than through any title or position. His grave has become a place of intercession. People come to pray for healing, for help in times of uncertainty, and for the hope of marriage. What endures here is not an individual’s biography so much as a practice: the belief that a life lived with integrity can continue to shape devotion, even after the body has been laid to rest.
In life, Burgeman was not known as a miracle worker or a public figure. He was a melamed, a teacher of children, living plainly among other Jewish immigrants in Rochester’s Jewish center in the early decades of the 20th century. At one point, he was dismissed from a teaching post for refusing to soften his instruction. He later opened his own cheder, or schoolroom. There was no congregation to inherit his name, no institution to archive his papers. When he died, he was buried in an ordinary way at Britton Road Cemetery, one grave among many.
What followed was not immediate.
Remembered in return
The meaning attached to Burgeman’s resting place accumulated slowly. Stories began to circulate. People spoke of his kindness, his discipline, his integrity. Over time, visitors came. The grave became a place not of answers, but of belief. For generations, this turning toward the dead has taken this same form. It is not worship. It is proximity. A way of standing near those believed to have lived rightly, and asking that their merit might still matter.
In Jewish tradition, prayer at a grave is a reflection on those believed to have lived with righteousness, asking that their merit accompany the living in moments of need. Psalms are traditionally recited. Words are often spoken quietly.
I have done something similar too. Years ago, before I converted to Judaism and before I had the means to travel, I sent a written prayer through a Chabad service that delivers letters to the grave of the Lubavitcher Rebbe in New York. Someone else carried it. I cannot say with absolute certainty what happened because of it. Only that the practice itself made space for hope that I was seen, and that a prayer was later answered in ways that shaped my life and deepened my understanding of Judaism.
Burgeman’s grave functions in a similar register, though without any institutional frame. People come not because his name is widely known, but because the story has endured. Over time, that story gathered details. The most persistent involves a dog said to have escorted Jewish children to Burgeman’s cheder so they would not be harassed along the way by other youths. The dog then stood watch until they were ready to return home. The versions differ. Some are reverent. Some are playful. Some verge on the miraculous. The story endures because it names something children needed: care, in a world that could be frightening.
In recent decades, Burgeman’s afterlife has taken on a digital form. His name surfaces in comment threads and genealogical forums, passed along by people who never met him and are not always sure how they are connected. Spellings are debated. Dates are corrected. A descendant appears. A former student’s grandchild adds a fragment. Someone asks whether this is the same man their grandmother spoke of. No single account settles the matter. Instead, memory gathers. What once traveled by word of mouth now moves through hyperlinks.
The internet allows fragments to remain visible. Burgeman’s story survives not because it was officially recorded, but because enough people cared to remember it. In this way, his legacy resembles the man himself: quiet, unadorned, sustained by actions rather than declaration.
This story does not offer certainty. It is about remembering a life and asking if we might still learn from it and if, perhaps, it can bring us closer to faith. Burgeman left no grand monument. He left descendants. A grave. A life of Jewish values that continues to teach.
Burgeman did not seek recognition in life. After death, he became something else: a teacher still teaching, not through words, but through the way people continue to act on his memory. That is the lesson. Not any miracle. Not any legend. The quiet insistence that a life lived with integrity does not end when the casket is placed into the earth.
Some graves are instructions.
This one still asks something of us.
The post Why a forgotten teacher’s grave became a Jewish pilgrimage site appeared first on The Forward.
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Turkey Sends Drilling Ship to Somalia in Major Push for Energy Independence
Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan speaks during a ceremony for the handover of new vehicles to the gendarmerie and police forces in Istanbul, Turkey, Nov. 28, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Murad Sezer
i24 News – Turkey has dispatched a drilling vessel to Somalia to begin offshore oil exploration, marking what officials describe as a historic step in Ankara’s drive to strengthen energy security and reduce reliance on imports.
Turkish Minister of Energy and Natural Resources Alparslan Bayraktar announced that the drilling ship Çagri Bey is set to sail from the port of Taşucu in southern Turkey, heading toward Somali territorial waters.
The vessel will pass through the Strait of Gibraltar and around the coast of southern Africa before reaching its destination, with drilling operations expected to begin in April or May.
Bayraktar described the mission as a “historic” milestone, saying it reflects Turkey’s long-term strategy to enhance national energy security and move closer to self-sufficiency.
The operation will be protected by the Turkish Naval Forces, which will deploy several naval units to secure both the vessel’s route and the drilling area in the Gulf of Aden and the Arabian Sea. The security arrangements fall under existing cooperation agreements between Ankara and Somalia.
The move aligns with a broader vision promoted by President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, aimed at reducing Turkey’s dependence on foreign energy supplies, boosting domestic production, and shielding the economy from external pressures.
Bayraktar said Turkey is also working to double its natural gas output in the Black Sea this year, while continuing offshore exploration along its northern coastline. In parallel, Ankara is preparing to bring its first nuclear reactor online at the Akkuyu Nuclear Power Plant, which is expected to begin generating electricity soon and eventually supply about 10% of the country’s energy needs.
The current drilling effort is based on survey data collected last year and forms part of Ankara’s wider plan to expand its energy exploration activities both regionally and internationally.