Rabbi Leopold Cohn and Family
It was during these years of rabbinic study that certain portions of Scripture leapt off the
page to Rabbi Cohn, especially the passages in the book of Daniel that describe the timeline
of Messiah’s coming. According to Daniel’s timeline, the Messiah should have already come
two thousand years ago! Cohn asked himself, Is it possible that the time which God had fixed
for the appearance of our Messiah had passed away without the promise of our true and Living
God being fulfilled? Cohn was perplexed. If Daniel was correct, then the rabbis of the Talmud
were wrong. Rabbi Cohn decided to dig deeper, but after much searching he could find no
satisfactory answers for his troubled soul. One rabbi in a distant town advised him to go
to America, where people knew more about the Messiah. So Cohn immediately made his
preparations to leave for the United States.
Three weeks after his arrival in America, New York City to be exact, Rabbi Cohn happened
to walk by a church where there was a sign with Hebrew letters saying, “Meetings for Jews.”
Too curious to turn away, Cohn entered the church, and to his utter amazement, the room
was packed with about eight hundred Jewish men and women. There was even a choir of
Jewish girls singing, “At the cross…” Cohn found this confusing, but he stayed to hear some
of the preaching. He was fascinated, but as an observant Orthodox Jew, there were many
cultural things that were off-putting to his traditional Jewish upbringing, such as women and
men sitting together, the presence of crosses, and the preacher saying God’s name without a
yarmulka (skullcap). Cohn left halfway through the message but got the contact information
for the preacher from the security guard. He visited the preacher at his home, and after much
discussion, the preacher gave him a New Testament in Yiddish to read. As Leopold read the
New Testament, he realized that Jesus was the true Jewish Messiah!
Brooklyn Beginnings
Cohn knew that there was only one course for him to follow: He must share the knowledge of
the Messiah, Yeshua, with his Jewish people. He explained an early encounter with members
of the local community: “I showed them from the Scriptures that to believe in Yeshua was
Jewish faith, real Jewish faith.” This became Leopold Cohn’s life calling. It also became a
guiding principle for Chosen People Ministries, which he founded in the Brownsville section
of Brooklyn, New York, in 1894 as the Brownsville Mission to the Jews. Two years later, the
Williamsburg Mission was added.
Leopold Cohn began this ministry by holding meetings in a store that was a renovated horse
stable. He founded his work in response to the Scriptural exhortation of Romans 1:16, “For I
am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes,
to the Jew first and also to the Greek.” The ministry’s first Bible meeting was attended by eight
Jewish people. The Lord continued to bless this work, and in the course of his lifetime, Leopold
Cohn led more than one thousand people to the Lord.
8 The Chosen People | JULY 2019