Binyamin Zeev Kahane

Dec 31, 2000 - Binyamin Zeev Kahane, 34, and his wife, Talia, 31, of Kfar Tapuah were killed when Palestinian snipers opened fire while they were driving home from Jerusalem on the Ramallah bypass road.

Binyamin Zeev Kahane, son of the late Kach leader Rabbi Meir Kahane, was killed, together with his wife Talia, in a shooting attack by terrorists who fired at their vehicle south of the settlement of Ofra. The family of eight had spent the Sabbath in Jerusalem and decided to delay returning to their home in Kfar Tapuah on Saturday night because of the numerous shooting incidents at Israeli vehicles traveling on the roads in Judea and Samaria.

Minutes before the attack the couple had dropped off their 9-year-old son, Meir, at Beit-El where he attended school. Kahane was fatally shot and lost control of the car which overturned. His wife, Talia, was critically injured and died in the ambulance en route to Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem. The couple's five daughters, aged two months to 10 years, were injured, one seriously.

Binyamin Zeev Kahane immigrated to Israel with his family in 1971, at the age of four. He studied at the Mercaz HaRav Rabbinical College. He directs Yeshivat HaRav Meir in Tapuah and has written several books on the halachic status of the non-Jew in Israel and on other topics of Jewish law.

His father, Rabbi Meir Kahane, founder of the extremist Kach movement which was outlawed in Israel in 1988, was assassinated by an Arab gunman in New York in November 1990. After his death, Binyamin Zeev Kahane returned to Israel and headed "Kahane Chai" (Kahane Lives), established to continue his father's legacy, until the party was banned by the Israeli government in 1994. Binyamin Kahane was jailed several times for his anti-Arab activities.

Binyamin and Talia Kahane were buried in Jerusalem.