Sara Cohen

Origins and early life

Sara Cohen was born in October 1927, during the intermediate days of Sukkot, in the village of Kulan near Sana'a in Yemen, and her family came up to the Land of Israel when she was about six months old; they settled in Jaffa and then in Kerem HaTeimanim, the Yemenite quarter of Tel Aviv.

Work and career

Her father was murdered during the Arab revolt when she was ten, and the child had to go out to work to help feed the family. At sixteen she married Shlomo Cohen, six years her senior, whom she had known in the Betar youth movement and whom Moshe Dayan nicknamed Suleiman the Great; the couple settled in Givatayim and had four children, all singers — Hofni, Pini, Izhar and Vardina. While her husband served in the Palmach the two began to sing at communal singing evenings, and they were among the founders of Havurat Ha'esh, the Fire Company, with Emanuel Zamir, Menashe Harel and Eliyahu Gamliel: that is the root of shira betzibur, the Israeli habit of a hall that sings rather than listens.

She and her husband performed in Israel and around the world — she said in an interview that they had sung across Europe and as far as Japan and China — in Hebrew and sometimes in Arabic, and recorded two albums together, Thirty Years of Song Around the Campfire in 1978 and Zimrat Ha'Aretz with the Suleiman the Great family in 1994. Israel's artists' union gave her its lifetime achievement award in 2021, after the stroke she suffered the previous winter. She died on 1 September 2023, at ninety-five, less than two months after her son Hofni.