Hannah Cohen

Hannah Floretta Cohen (1875-1946) was an English civil servant and philanthropist, and the first woman to be president of the Jewish Board of Guardians. Life Cohen was born on 25 May 1875 in Kensington, London, the daughter of Conservative politician Sir Benjamin Cohen (1844-1909) and Louisa Emily Merton (1850-1931), both of whom were great-grandchildren of Levy Barent Cohen (1747-1808), of whom The Jewish Encyclopedia says that "Through the distinguished marriages which his children contracted, nearly all the leading Jewish families in England are connected with him". She was educated at Roedean School and read classics at Newnham College, Cambridge(1894–97) and "grew up in an opulent Anglo-Jewish milieu in which it was accepted that members of the dominant families would assume the burdens of communal leadership". In 1937 she published Changing faces : A memoir of Louisa Lady Cohen by her daughter (Martin Hopkinson & Co.) which her father's ODNB biographer described as "an engaging, if not always factually accurate, memoir of her family". In later life she was a member of the governing body of many organisations including Roedean and Newnham, Swanley Horticultural College, and the Jewish orphanage at Norwood. She did not marry, and died in Hindhead, Surrey on 21 November 1946.