Rabbi Henry Cohen

Henry Cohen is also known for saving a Greek Catholic from deportation and banishing Shakespeare’s Shylock from the Galveston public schools. In 1928 Congregation B'nai Israel decided to add a new facility and name it the Henry Cohen Community House.

Rabbi Henry Cohen, who provide a place for thousands of Jewish immigrants now routed through the port of Galveston. 
Cohen was born in England in 1863 and educated in its schools. He was ordained a rabbi in 1884 and accepted his first assignment in Jamaica. In 1885 he moved to Woodville, Mississippi, to serve the Jewish community there, then moved on to Galveston in 1888 to become rabbi of Temple B’nai Israel.  Cohen became a prominent citizen of Galveston and was instrumental in helping the community respond to the destruction of the hurricane which destroyed a great deal of the island’s buildings and took the lives of more than 6,000 of its citizens in 1900. Cohen also served in the American forces in France during WWI and helped with the struggle to make rabbis eligible for appointment as military chaplains. He also served in appointed state offices and on many boards, but Cohen’s work with immigrants is legendary.

In Galveston, Cohen founded the Jewish Immigrant Information Bureau to help relieve the pressure of anti-Semitism on Hester Street. As the flow of Jewish immigrants began to flow through Galveston, Cohen recruited sponsors, usually other Jews, not just in Texas but also throughout the Great Plains of the United States. Many a community enjoyed significant economic development due to the industry and hard work of these new citizens.

And there is this anecdote in Ronald Axelrod’s article on Rabbi Cohen that appeared in the East Texas Historical Journal. A Russian immigrant arrived in Galveston without appropriate admission papers. The man was immediately retained for deportation, until Rabbi Cohen traveled to Washington to petition President William Howard Taft to overrule the regulations. When Taft replied that it was unfair for him to change the rules for one of Cohen’s Jews, the Rabbi told the president that the immigrant was not Jewish but an Orthodox Christian. Cohen had traveled all that way in behalf of someone in need, whether of his faith or not. Rabbi Cohen died in 1952.