Itamar Cohen
Itamar Cohen · Arts & Literature
Soloist of the Nahal army troupe in the 1950s and the voice of Rachel Rachel and the Ballad of a Spring and a Sea, who then toured Europe and America and recorded in the United States and France; son of a Yemenite Jewish family of Neve Tzedek
1937, Neve Tsedek, Tel-Aviv, Palestine mandataire
Israël
Itamar Cohen is recognized among Jewish contributors to Arts & Literature — Soloist of the Nahal army troupe in the 1950s and the voice of Rachel Rachel and the Ballad of a Spring and a Sea, who then toured Europe and America and recorded in the United States and France; son of a Yemenite Jewish family of Neve Tzedek
Origins and early life
Itamar Cohen, born in 1937 and raised in the Neve Tzedek quarter of Tel Aviv, is one of the sons of Yaakov Shlomo Cohen, who came from Yemen in the Second Aliyah and became one of the leaders of the Yemenite Association in the country.
Work and career
He joined the Nahal troupe, the army band of the Israel Defense Forces, in 1956, and became its soloist: he sang Rachel Rachel, by Yehiel Mohar and Moshe Wilensky, and The Story of a Road in the programme Ma Bo'er, and later, when he was among the veterans of the band, the Ballad of a Spring and a Sea — songs that stayed in the country's memory. He went on to tour Europe and America with success and recorded discs in the United States and in France, then came home to Israel.
From the 1980s he chose to step out of public view and has refused interviews ever since, without ever stopping: at eighty-seven he was still recording and singing, which is why the music historian Dudi Patimer had to reconstruct his story from archives rather than from an interview. His is one of the singular voices of Hebrew song, in a family that has several: his brother Shlomo was known as Suleiman the Great, a pioneer of Israeli communal singing; his brother David sang across Europe as David the Red Sea Singer; and among his nephews and nieces are Hofni, Pinchas and Vardina Cohen, and Izhar Cohen, who won the Eurovision Song Contest for Israel in 1978.
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Source: Maariv — La ballade d'Itamar Cohen (Dudi Patimer, 2024)
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Soloist of the Nahal army troupe in the 1950s and the voice of Rachel Rachel and the Ballad of a Spring and a Sea, who then toured Europe and America and recorded in the United States and France; son of a Yemenite Jewish family of Neve Tzedek
Source: Maariv — La ballade d'Itamar Cohen (Dudi Patimer, 2024)
