Shmuel Cohen
Shmuel Cohen (1870–1940) was a Jewish musician born near Ungheni, in what is now Moldova. He moved to Ottoman Palestine in 1887 to escape growing antisemitism and settled in Rishon LeZion, where he worked as a vintner and played the violin.
Cohen is best known for composing the music to Hatikvah, Israel’s national anthem. He married Minya Papirmeister and they had a daughter named Ida. He earned the nickname “Stempenu” from a character in Shalom Aleichem’s stories and even wrote a short biography titled Stempenu in 1938.
He helped support early Jewish settlement efforts in Palestine. Cohen was one of the founders of the first Keren Kayemet in Rishon LeZion in 1889 and contributed to the founding of Rehovot. He briefly returned to Ungheni to try running a girls’ school, but after it failed he went back to Rishon LeZion to continue his life as a vintner and to raise his family.
Musically, Cohen took Naftali Herz Imber’s poem Tikvatenu (Our Hope) and set it to a Moldovan/Romanian folk tune, “Carul cu boi” (The Ox Cart). This helped the poem spread quickly among Zionist communities, and in 1933 at a Zionist Congress in Prague it was formally adopted and renamed Hatikvah.
Hatikvah became widely sung around the world, including by Holocaust survivors and in later Israeli events. It was sometimes restricted by authorities during the British Mandate. The song was performed at the Israeli Declaration of Independence in 1948.
Cohen died on March 28, 1940, and was buried in the Old Rishon LeZion Cemetery. In 2020, his grave and his wife Minya’s grave were restored by the Jewish American Society for Historic Preservation, with a sculpture by Sam Philipe featuring a flame, a Star of David, and a musical clef, crafted from metal fragments of Qassem rockets.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 08:18 (CET).