By Ellen Braunstein
Stanley Wolf Cohen, a Philadelphia cantor, hospice chaplain and longtime accountant who taught more than 300 boys their bar mitzvah portions with patience and care, died on Sept. 7 at 97.
Many of those boys he reached out to were developmentally disabled. “He got them to do 10 lines or more,” his son David Cohen said. “I remember several parents hugging my dad — they were so proud. They never thought their son could do it.” His willingness to adapt lessons and patiently guide each student gave boys a chance to succeed at the bimah.
Families often said he gave their sons confidence they carried long after the bar mitzvah.
Cohen grew up during the Depression as the youngest of eight children on a Bucks County farm in Pipersville. He often recalled the one-room schoolhouse he attended and the sting of antisemitic taunts from classmates. His father advised him to answer back with a slur common for the Pennsylvania Dutch in the area.
He loved two things, David Cohen said: “He was spiritual and he also liked numbers.” He worked as an accountant for most of his life, eventually earning his CPA at about 50. Along the way, he completed his bachelor’s degree at Temple University in 1965, attending at night for roughly 11 years while raising a family. He began but did not finish a master’s program in industrial psychology, which briefly led him into marketing and product development at Merck & Co. Inc., rather than his usual accounting work.
His posts included Lee & Associates, comptroller roles at the University of Pennsylvania’s physics department and the Jewish Community Centers, first the Raymond and Miriam Klein Branch and then the main Center City branch. By the mid-1980s, he shifted to private practice while pursuing his religious calling, serving many loyal clients for decades.
Cohen’s voice carried him from choirs to the pulpit. In his younger years, he sang sacred music in churches and synagogues, later training to become a cantor with Cantor Herman Bornstein, a leading figure in Philadelphia who influenced a generation of cantors. “He would sing anywhere,” David Cohen said. In his late 40s and early 50s, he moved formally into cantorial work, first in a synagogue choir and then as a cantor.
He served at synagogues in Philadelphia and later at Temple Emanu-El, once a synagogue in Willingboro, New Jersey, led by Rabbi Richard A. Levine. His approach to the pulpit was reverent and disciplined. “He looked at singing and being a cantor like he was basically speaking to God — praying to God for the congregation,” David Cohen said.
Around 1970, Cohen began tutoring boys for their bar mitzvahs, a practice that continued for about 16 years. He recorded portions, taught the cantillation signs and paced the work with unusual calm, often winning over reluctant students with humor and encouragement. Parents who had been told their sons could never manage a portion were astonished when he helped them master it.
Music filled his family’s life. His granddaughter, Jessica L. Brimmer, remembered listening in the car to training tapes of Cantor Bornstein and her grandfather singing back and forth. “I found them really comforting,” she said. She remembered him singing opera and show tunes — “Old Man River” among them — even while driving. Brimmer said that visiting him on the bimah of a Reform synagogue felt special: “He’d be in a really fancy kittel, his tallis had gold embroidery, and he’d have a hat on over his yarmulke. I described it as feeling like we were part of a royal family.”
After winding down from the cantor role in the mid-1990s, Cohen trained and served as a nonsectarian hospice chaplain with VITAS Healthcare for about 12 years. The work suited his temperament and sense of purpose. “It gave him an opportunity to provide comfort to people,” David Cohen said. He preferred the direct mission of visiting patients and families to what he perceived as synagogue politics. He considered the role a mitzvah, a sacred obligation, and found meaning in sitting quietly with patients, listening more than he spoke.
Family described him as calm and steady. “My mother, [Shirley (Blackman) Cohen], called him a ‘gentle lion,’” his son said. He kept driving until August of last year and remained mentally sharp. “Even at the end,” Brimmer said, “we were telling family stories and he’d start smiling and say, ‘You’re changing the story.’ He was listening to everything.” On Aug. 24, the family gathered — 21 people in his hospice room — to mark his 97th birthday. His daughter Sheri (Cohen) Rosengarten had died on Aug. 16.
Cohen’s religious compass led him to officiate family weddings and funerals, even when custom for a kohen might discourage certain rites. For him, presence and comfort came first. Brimmer said, “A lot of clergymen follow the letter of the Torah. He was led by a spiritual compass and an ethical compass.”
“He married together a couple of his passions,” David Cohen said. “He loved to sing, and he loved to help people.”
Ellen Braunstein is a freelance writer.