Isaac Cohen
British rabbi
Isaac Cohen (26 July 1914 – 30 November 2007) was a British Talmudic scholar and Chief Rabbi of Ireland for 20 years.
Education
Born in Llanelli, Wales to immigrants from Lithuania, he won a scholarship in 1928 to Aria College in Portsmouth, a boarding school which combined Jewish study with a place at Portsmouth Grammar School. In 1931 he enrolled at Jews College and University College London and gained a Bachelor of Arts in Semitics in 1935. In 1939 he married Fanny Weisfogel of London and they settled in Leeds. After the Second World War, he returned to London to complete his rabbinical diploma, which he gained in 1948, and subsequently took up a rabbinical position in Edinburgh. In 1956 he gained his PhD from the University of Edinburgh for research into Talmudic thought.
Appointments
His first post was at Harrow and Kenton Synagogue in Middlesex in 1935. In 1939 he moved to Leeds United Hebrew Congregation in the capacity of an additional minister in the Moortown area. He set up a Citizens Advice Bureau to help Jewish evacuees from London and was an officiating chaplain for Jewish Servicemen. In 1947 he succeeded Dr Salis Daiches as rabbi of the Edinburgh Hebrew Congregation.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 14, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6076157. VIAF identifies the subject as 63817730. The Library of Congress control number is no2008068907. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1914, 2007, 1928 and 1931.
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