Henry Cohen

Who was Henry Cohen?

Henry Cohen was a British-American rabbi, scholar, community activist and writer who served most of his career at Congregation B'nai Israel in Galveston, Texas, from 1888 to 1949. He came to the United States in 1885, during a period of rapid and massive growth related to early 20th-century immigration from eastern and southern Europe. In Texas, he organized the Galveston Movement, which worked from 1907 to 1914 to attract eastern European Jewish immigrants to Galveston and the Gulf Coast as a destination, as an alternative to the better known Northeastern cities. Ten thousand such immigrants entered at Galveston.

When his congregation built a community house in 1928, they named it in his honor. He helped organize and lead many educational and community institutions. Able to read ten languages, he was known as a Talmud scholar, and published books about Texas history and Judaism. Together with rabbi David Lefkowitz of Dallas, Cohen interviewed many Jewish Texans to collect their histories for the Texas Centennial in 1936.