Leopold Cohn (Messianic rabbi)
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Rabbi Leopold Hoffman Cohn (1862, Berezna, Hungary - December 19, 1937, Brookly, NY)
Rabbi Dr. Leopold Cohn, founder and president of Chosen People Ministries, was educated in the Yeshivas of central Europe. Dr. Cohn was a rabbi of an orthodox synagogue in Hungary and shortly after his arrival to the United States became a believer that Jesus is the promised Messiah of Israel. His first efforts at convincing other Jews of this encountered bitter hostility. Slowly, he developed a society known as the Williamsburg Mission to the Jews and the work grew to reach across the United States by means of branch stations and missionaries. Branches were later established in Poland, Germany, France, Latvia and Israel. Dr Cohn was honored with the degree of Doctor of Divinity by Wheaton College in 1930.
An interesting controversy over the identity of the founder of Chosen People Ministries, Rabbi Leopold Cohn, emerged in a 1913 court case. The allegation was made that Leopold Cohn was one Itsak Leib Joszovics, a saloonkeeper who had been arrested and sentenced for fraud in Hungary in 1891. Allegedly, he left Hungary to avoid serving a two and a half years sentence, leaving behind his wife and children. Witnesses were called who alleged that the two were indeed one and the same person. This is also the assessment of David Max Eichhorn, in Evangelizing the American Jew (Middle Village, NY: Jonathan David, 1978), who states that he escaped to the United States under an assumed name (Cohn) and profession (Rabbi).
However, the mission's official history argues that this was simply the culmination of a series of schemes that had been devised to discredit Rabbi Cohn, all spearheaded by the same group of men, Neuowich, Spievacque, and Schapiro among others. The previous attempt being one to discredit him as a womanizer. This conspiracy had ended with the arrest of the conspirators upon Cohn's complaint to the police. While a conviction against the conspirators was not obtained, Cohn's name was cleard.[citation needed] The attempt to identify him as Joszovics similarly ended in court when Cohn sued the conspirators for trespassing and for defamation of character. The document supposedly identifying Cohn as Joszovics was a copy and could not be verified as genuine. Also, the ministry argues the 'birth mark' that the document referred to was a red spot under Cohn's eye that had appeared only after he had emigrated to America, as a result of a physical attack against him 1894 by opponents of his new missionary work in Brownsville. See Harold Sevener, A Rabbi's Vision' (Charlotte, NC: Chosen People Ministries, 1994), pp. 59-62.
Yaakov Ariel, in 'Evangelizing the Chosen People' (Chapel Hill, NC: Univ of North Carolina Press, 2000), p. 29 summarizes the dispute this way: "If Cohn was not the former rabbi he claimed to have been, then he must have been a particularly gifted person. His knowledge, intelligence, and writing ability were much superior to those that would be expected from an uneducated saloon keeper." However, many in the Jewish community contend that his writings were significantly below par to present himself as a rabbi and doubt his claims to being a rabbi. [1] And why couldn't he prove his status as a rabbi? His son Joseph Hoffman Cohn claimed that his father did not retrieve his rabbinic ordination and references prior to his immigration to the United States. However, this is not a reasonable claim, as his ordination certificate would have allowed him better access to the community and a possible way of earning money once he came to the United States.[citation needed]
