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(JTA) — Hundreds of mourners filled a Savannah, Georgia, synagogue to remember a Jewish soldier killed in action in Afghanistan on July 12.

Sgt. 1st Class Christopher Andrew Celiz, 32, an Army Ranger and native of Summerville, Georgia, was wounded by enemy small-arms fire while helping to support a medical evacuation landing zone during a counterterrorism operation, Army officials said. He died at a medical treatment facility.

His funeral took place Wednesday afternoon at Congregation Mickve Israel in historic Savannah, the Post and Courier reported. Flags were lowered at half-staff throughout the state in his honor.

Friends from Summerville High School and The Citadel remembered him as “smart, caring and upbeat,” the paper reported.

“I’ve never seen a man love his wife and his child as much as he loved them,” a friend said. Celiz and his wife, Katie, began dating in high school.

The Savannah Jewish Educational Alliance and Savannah Jewish Federation mourned Celiz in a statement on Facebook.

“A husband, father, and leader, Chris was known as a man who ‘led from the front’; He was the first one in, worried about the welfare of his troops,” they wrote. “He died as he lived … as a hero.”

Celiz and his wife were contributors to the federation campaign.

Celiz deployed from 2008 to 2009 in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom and from 2011 to 2012 in support of Operation Enduring Freedom, according to the U.S. Defense Department. He was on his fifth deployment when he was killed.

Celiz was posthumously awarded the Meritorious Service Medal, Bronze Star Medal and the Purple Heart.

Alyssa Fisher is a news writer at the Forward. Email her at fisher@forward.com, or follow her on Twitter at @alyssalfisher

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There will be strikes across Israel on Sunday to protest a new law that excludes LGBT couples from state-supported surrogate pregnancies, Quartz reported.

Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu swooped in with a last-minute vote Wednesday, rejecting an amendment to an existing law that allowed only heterosexual married couples to qualify for government-funded surrogacy under Israel’s national health care system. The new law expanded eligibility to single women, but not single men. Israel does not yet recognize same-sex marriage, so the change effectively rules out surrogacy for gay and lesbian couples.

The new law spurred immediate public protests from Israel’s activist community, along with condemnation from private sector companies, particularly from the country’s many high-tech firms.

Dozens of major Israeli companies — along with large multinationals ranging from IBM and Microsoft to PayPal and Novartis — are planning to help the cause, offering a paid day off to employees joining Sunday’s protests. Other firms, like airline Israir, will allow their employees to wear black instead of their usual uniforms on Sunday as a sign of protest.

Microsoft, meanwhile, said that it will provide about $16,500 to any Israeli employee seeking to start families via surrogacy, regardless of sexual orientation, gender or marital status.

Alyssa Fisher is a news writer at the Forward. Email her at fisher@forward.com, or follow her on Twitter at @alyssalfisher

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Michael Cohen, President Trump’s personal lawyer, secretly recorded a conversation with Trump two months before the presidential election, in which they discussed payments to a former Playboy model who said she had an affair with Trump, according to lawyers and others familiar with the recording.

The F.B.I. seized the recording this year during a raid on Cohen’s office, the New York Times reported Friday. The Justice Department is investigating Cohen’s involvement in paying women to dilute embarrassing news stories about Trump ahead of the 2016 election. Prosecutors want to know whether that violated federal campaign finance laws.

Rudolph Giuliani, Trump’s personal lawyer, confirmed in a phone call to the Times on Friday that Trump had discussed the payments with Cohen on the tape; however, he said the payment was ultimately never made. He said the recording was less than two minutes and demonstrated that the president had done nothing wrong.

“In the big scheme of things, it’s powerful exculpatory evidence,” Giuliani said.

The former model, Karen McDougal, says she began a nearly yearlong affair with Trump in 2006, shortly after Mr. Trump’s wife, Melania, gave birth to their son Barron. McDougal sold her story to The National Enquirer for $150,000 during the final months of the presidential campaign, but the tabloid sat on the story, which kept it from becoming public.

Cohen, who is Jewish, grew up in Long Island. His father is a Holocaust survivor, and he is married to Ukrainian immigrant Laura Shusterman.

Alyssa Fisher is a news writer at the Forward. Email her at fisher@forward.com, or follow her on Twitter at @alyssalfisher

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Following the election, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg placed a secret, previously unreported call to then president-elect Donald Trump, during which, sources told BuzzFeed News, he congratulated the Trump team on its victory and successful campaign — which spent millions of dollars on advertising with Facebook.

The private call between Zuckerberg and Trump, which was confirmed by three people familiar with the conversation, is just one in a series of private endorsements from Facebook employees of the Trump campaign’s ad efforts on the platform.

In addition to interviews with Trump campaign staffers and former Facebook employees, BuzzFeed News got hold of company presentations and memos that show the social network viewed Trump’s campaign as an “innovator” of a fast-moving, test-oriented approach to marketing on Facebook.

Those lessons led to methods refining the marketing model, called “Test, Learn, Adapt.” These internal documents show an honest view of the GOP candidate’s advertising success and reveal Trump as a potential regulator or source of misinformation, as well as a valued customer, Buzzfeed News reported.

Facebook asserts that the company offered the same level of support to both campaigns, offering insights into how the products work and provide technical support.

Trump staffers and Facebook’s internal memos, however, make it clear that it was his campaign that used those tools to much a greater level. In a 2017 internal presentation document, one Facebook marketing group suggested that the company “bring in innovators,” specifically naming the Trump campaign, to brainstorm how it could refine its own ad strategies.

Alyssa Fisher is a news writer at the Forward. Email her at fisher@forward.com, or follow her on Twitter at @alyssalfisher

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Jared Kushner, senior adviser to President Trump, Jason Greenblatt, special U.S. representative for international negotiations, and David Friedman, U.S. ambassador to Israel, penned the Washington Post piece, “Help is at hand for Palestinians. It’s all up to Hamas,” where they expressed their concern for the continuing “nightmare.”

The relationship between the three men predates their work together in President Trump’s administration, as they have ties to the worlds of New York real estate and law.

“The nightmare of Hamas’s leadership is continuing and needlessly prolonging the suffering of the Palestinian people in Gaza,” it reads.

International donors are conflicted, the officials wrote.

“Should they try to help the people directly, at the certain risk of enriching terrorists, or withhold funding to Hamas and watch the people it is supposed to govern suffer?”

There’s no good option, they said: Either the government must change or Hamas must recognize the state of Israel. The officials were not shy about their opinion on the matter.

“Seventy years after the founding of Israel, it would be wise for Hamas to acknowledge that the existence of Israel is a permanent reality,” they wrote. “Almost all in the Middle East have come to accept this fact, and many even embrace it. At the expense of the Palestinian people, Hamas is fighting a morally bankrupt, decades-old war that has long been lost.”

Alyssa Fisher is a news writer at the Forward. Email her at fisher@forward.com, or follow her on Twitter at @alyssalfisher