Shlomo Cohen (Suleiman the Great)

Origins and early life

Shlomo Cohen, known to everyone as Suleiman the Great — a nickname Moshe Dayan gave him — was born in 1921 in Neve Tzedek, in Tel Aviv, one of seven sons and two daughters of Yaakov Shlomo Cohen, who had come up from Yemen in the Second Aliyah, founded and ran the Yemenite workers' council of the Yemenite Association in Tel Aviv, and sat in the Assembly of Representatives and on the National Council.

Work and career

As a young man he sang in the Bnei Machol troupe, and in the Palmach he was one of the founders of Havurat Ha'esh, the Fire Group — with his wife Sara, Emanuel Zamir, Menashe Harel and Eliyahu Gamliel — most of whose members came from the Arab Department: they spent their evenings around a campfire singing Hebrew songs — Ayal, ayal ben karnayim, How Beautiful Are the Nights of Canaan, Shoshanat Teiman, the Rose of Yemen.

After the state was founded he was the one who kept the group alive, with his wife, the singer Sara Cohen, born in a village near Sana'a and brought to the country at six months old, and their children: Hofni, called Little Suleiman, Pinchas, who was a soloist of the Nahal entertainment company, Vardina, and Izhar Cohen, who won the Eurovision Song Contest for Israel in 1978. He is counted among the pioneers of shira betzibur, the Israeli practice in which a hall does not listen to a singer but sings with him, and the family recorded it twice: Thirty Years of Song Around the Campfire for the state's thirtieth anniversary in 1978, with a choir from kibbutz Shefayim, and Zimrat Ha'Aretz with the Suleiman the Great family in 1994.

Givatayim made him an honoured citizen in 1992 and named a square after him; his brother Itamar was the soloist of the Nahal troupe and his brother David sang in Europe as David the Red Sea Singer. He went on performing almost to his last day, despite the kidney disease he died of in 2009, at eighty-eight.