Rosalie Cohen, leader in Jewish community, dies one month before 100th birthday
Times Picayune 04-10-2010
Submitted By NOVA

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Rosalie Cohen, a lifelong student of Judaism, an advocate for Jewish culture and education and
one of the leading members of New Orleans’ pre-Katrina Jewish community, died Wednesday in
Cincinnati, where she lived with family members after the hurricane, her granddaughter, Lisa
Liman, said. She died a month short of her 100th birthday.

Mrs. Cohen was devoted to exploring the cultural riches of Judaism and spreading that legacy to
other Jews, and beyond. She served on major national and local organizations promoting Jewish
life and culture. Her work nourished Jewish artists, writers and musicians, underwrote Jewish
education and supported the state of Israel.

“I was brought up to understand the significance of being a Jew, the responsibility it carried,
the fact that we were a small community in the world, that despite so many tragic happenings
throughout history — two exiles, the Crusades, the Inquisition, the pogroms — nevertheless, we
survived. And not only survived, but survived creatively,” she said in 1995.

That passion was planted in Rosalie Palter’s childhood, when her Russian immigrant parents,
living in a densely Jewish neighborhood just off Oretha Castle Haley Boulevard — then known as
Dryades Street — arranged to have her privately tutored by the Jewish intellectual and poet
Ephraim Lisitzky.

As a child, she watched her parents and their friends gathered in her living room, swapping
Jewish newspapers and discussing the emergence of Zionism, the movement then sweeping global
Jewry. By her teen years, she was fluent in Hebrew and steeped in Jewish literature and history.
As a newlywed in 1929, she and her husband, surgeon Joseph Cohen, honeymooned at the historic
World Zionist Conference in Zurich, attended by figures like Albert Einstein and David Ben
Gurion.

Zionism, the drive to establish and secure Israel as a safe homeland for Jews, was always
integral to her larger mission, but she was never a political ideologue, said Mrs. Cohen’s
granddaughter.

Cultured and soft-spoken, Mrs. Cohen cultivated a Southern graciousness even while she
aggressively pursued her cultural and educational agendas on the national stage.

“She was a feminist long before it was time to call it that,” a friend and Jewish scholar,
Bobbie Malone, once said of her.

Mrs. Cohen helped found the National Foundation for Jewish Culture, which financed Jewish
studies at American universities and supports Jewish scholars and artists. Locally, she was the
first woman to head the Jewish Federation of Greater New Orleans, in 1959. For years she led a
Torah study, and at home her Shabbat table sometimes drew Jewish scholars and guests providing
fresh conversation around Jewish and other topics. She helped establish the Hillel Center, an
outreach to Jewish students at Tulane University, and the Algiers retirement complex that is now
Woldenberg Village.

Mrs. Cohen is survived by a son, Carmel, of New York, a daughter, Sharon Leviton of San Antonio,
three grandchildren and five great-grandchildren.

A memorial service will be Sunday at 12:30 p.m. at Congregation Shir Chadash, 3737 West
Esplanade Ave. in Metairie.