Shmuel Cohen compositions sheet music and chords

Shmuel Cohen (1870–1940) composed the music for the Israeli national anthem, "Hatikvah (The Hope)". Samuel (Shmuel) Cohen was born in a small town near Ungheni, Moldavia, then part of the Russian Empire. Motivated by a rising tide of Russian state-sponsored antisemitism and terrorism (pogroms), Cohen immigrated to Ottoman Palestine in 1887. He settled in Rishon LeZion ("First to Zion") as part of the Hovevei Zion ("Lovers of Zion") movement. Rishon LeZion was established in 1882, as a Jewish agricultural cooperative on barren land purchased from two brothers, Musa and Mustafa el Dagani. In Rishon LeZion, Cohen married Minya Papirmeister and made his living as a vintner. Cohen was an accomplished local violinist. He was given the nickname “Stempenu”, after the famous fictional klezmer violinist in Shalom Aleichem's book of the same name. In 1938, when Cohen wrote his biography, he titled it Stempenu.