Originally published June 2016. Updated June 2026.
Family and friends continue to mourn the death of Alan Weinkrantz, the American PR executive killed in Tel Aviv on June 18, 2016, when a car drove into the patio of the Furama Chinese restaurant where he was dining. The driver had suffered a heart attack and lost control of the vehicle. The crash killed Weinkrantz, the driver, his passenger, and another patron, and injured six others.A career bridging American tech and Israeli startups
Weinkrantz was in Israel on a business trip at the time of the accident. He had flown to Israel on dozens of occasions over more than two decades, working as a strategic communications adviser and brand ambassador to the country's technology sector. He met regularly with founders, ran storytelling workshops at accelerators, and embedded himself in the Israeli startup community at a moment when that community was still defining its global identity. He wrote for The Times of Israel, where he was a contributing columnist covering the Israeli startup economy, and for Geektime. From November 2014 until his death, he served as a brand ambassador for Rackspace, the San Antonio-based cloud-services company, with a remit covering the Israeli developer market. In his own words, Weinkrantz had "worked with virtually every high-tech accelerator and cooperative work space in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Haifa, Nazareth, and Be'er Sheva." That was not an exaggeration. The list of founders he advised, mentored, or wrote about reads as a directory of the early 2010s Israeli startup landscape.What colleagues remembered
Miriam Schwab, a longtime friend, told Ynetnews: "We met seven years ago and were pretty close. We would see each other whenever possible, during his visits to Israel. He was just a kind-hearted, honest, decent man with a positive attitude. He was always looking to help out." The Haaretz obituary described him as "an honest, generous person." Colleagues across Israel's tech press and accelerator community took to social media in the days following the crash to share memories of him and the work he had done on their behalf. His daughter Lauren learned of his death from the American Embassy the day before Father's Day. She wrote on Facebook that her father had been her "best friend."The institutional contribution
Weinkrantz's career was longer than the period he spent in Israel. He had spent 35 years running his own agency in San Antonio, Texas, building expertise across data networking, cybersecurity, and wireless internet — the foundational technology categories of the post-1990s American tech economy. He held a bachelor's degree in business administration and volunteered as a mentor for startups from 2006 until his passing. He was a contributing columnist at The Times of Israel for Startup Israel and at Owner Magazine for the StartOver Economy. He gave generously of his time to founders who could not yet afford his counsel, and his pro bono mentorship work touched startups across both his home base in Texas and his adopted second base in Israel. The communications industry he served — startup PR for emerging technology companies — is now a defined discipline with its own playbooks and its own senior practitioners. A material share of the people now running that discipline in Israel came up through events Weinkrantz organized, accelerators he worked with, or articles he wrote about their companies.Survived by
Weinkrantz is survived by his two children, Lauren and his son, and by an extended community of founders, journalists, and tech executives in Israel, Texas, and across the United States who counted him as a mentor and a friend.By the EPR Editorial Team
