Jacob Xenab Cohen, 1889-1955

Jacob Xenab Cohen (1889-1955)

Jacob Cohen was born in New York City to Lithuanian Jewish parents on August 15, 1889. As the eldest son of immigrant parents, young Jacob carried his parents' expectations for his success as well as the responsibility of caring for numerous younger siblings after school. A quiet and dynamic young man, Jacob Cohen graduated from the Hebrew Technical Institute at the age of 17, and was immediately hired as a draftsman by a Brooklyn manufacturing company. In late 1906, the engineering firm of Herring and Fuller hired him, where by 1915 he had established his reputation as a sanitary engineer. Attending night school at Cooper Union, he achieved his B.S.C.E. in 1911, and was hired to teach night classes there in 1913. It was during this period that he adopted the middle name "Xenab" to distinguish himself from the other Jacob Cohens then living in New York.

In 1915, the newly-married "J. X." Cohen was hired by the City of Syracuse, New York, to design a Sewage Disposal Works. This work, carried out under the auspices of the Syracuse Intercepting Sewer Board was completed in 1925. Long dedicated to Jewish liberalism and impressed by the example of Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, Cohen had been a founder of the Bronx Free Synagogue in 1914 and served as its first President. Thus, it was no surprise that, at the urging of friends, Cohen entered the Jewish Institute of Religion in 1925 to study for the rabbinate under Stephen Wise. By 1929, he had achieved both the rabbinical and M.H.L. degrees, and was immediately hired as Associate Rabbi of the Free Synagogue--a post he held for more than eleven years.

Cohen was also active with Stephen Wise in the American Jewish Congress, serving both on its Governing Council and as Chair of its National Committee on Economic Problems. From the latter post, he directed studies of employment discrimination of which the best known are Jews, Jobs and Discrimination (1937), Helping to End Economic Discrimination (1937), and Toward Fair Play for Jewish Workers (1938). Altogether, Cohen authored some 60 reports on employment discrimination against Jews and African Americans between 1930 and 1944. He was an outspoken advocate for FDR's Fair Employment Practices Commission. In 1940, he traveled to South America on behalf of the American Jewish Congress to survey the economic and political condition of Jewish communities throughout Latin America. The trip culminated in a book, Jewish Life in South America (1941), for which Stephen Wise penned a foreword.

J. X. demonstrated strong feelings for the welfare of the unfortunate throughout his career. In Syracuse, he was a member of the Board of Directors (later President) of the Jewish Communal Home and Secretary of the local Federation of Jewish Charities. He was subsequently appointed Executive Director of the Jewish Home for Aged. While at the Jewish Institute of Religion, he used these experiences in his masters thesis, titled "Ancient and Modern Care of the Aged--A Study of Paupers, Poorhouses and Pensions." As a rabbi, he continued his work for the less fortunate by chairing the Committee on the Jewish Chaplaincy of the New York Board of Rabbis and extending its work to hospitals, prison facilities and other institutions of social welfare.

Jacob X. Cohen's busy and dynamic career came to an abrupt end in 1950, when he was struck by a degenerative neurological illness which greatly depleted his physical capabilities. The last five years of his life were spent in his home, as a bedridden invalid, although he retained his mental faculties to the end. Death finally and mercifully claimed him on April 24, 1955.

Sources: Cohen, Sadie Alta F. Engineer of the Soul: A Biography of Rabbi J. X. Cohen (1889-1955) (New York: Bloch Publishing Company, 1961). S. v., "Cohen, Jacob Xenab," Universal Jewish Encyclopedia, vol. 3 (New York, 1941), p. 247.