My Pilgrimage to Leonard Cohen’s Montreal

A musician, a synagogue, a backyard poem, and a day in the city he loved.

“May your voice reach that Place and bring down the blessings.”

That’s what Leonard Cohen once told Gideon Zelermyer, the Cantor of the grand Shaar Hashomayim synagogue in Westmount, Montreal - the synagogue built by Cohen’s grandfather, Lyon Cohen, which Leonard attended as he grew up.

Zelermyer passed these words on to me last week, when I visited the synagogue on the day of the ten-year memorial concert for Leonard Cohen, hosted and performed by his son, the musician Adam Cohen.

Leonard Cohen has long been my rabbi, my patron saint. So for me, the trip was a pilgrimage.

My old friend, the brilliant entrepreneur and writer Mitch Joel, is also a Leonard Cohen devotee - one who grew up in the city. On the day of the concert, he gave me such a lovely and thoughtful tour of Leonard Cohen’s Montreal. I was very lucky to have a personal tour, so today, I thought I’d share it with you:

This is the cafe at the Hotel Place d’Armes, where I stayed. It has nothing to do with Leonard, but it was a lovely spot and I thought my fellow lovers of cafes would like to know about it!

This, unbelievably, is the entrance to a grand Montreal cafe, known as Cafe Crew. Again, it has nothing to do with Leonard, but Mitch told me that it’s a Montreal mainstay that I had to visit, and he was right!

More from Cafe Crew.

And here, my fellow LC devotees, is the house where he grew up. Somewhere in that backyard lies the first poem he ever wrote, at age 9, when his father passed away. The young Leonard buried the poem along with his father’s bowtie.

The house is beside the glorious Parc King George, where Leonard used to play.

Here’s the magisterial synagogue that Leonard’s grandfather built (and which, in a lovely twist of fate, my wonderful mother-in-law Bobbi Cain attended when she was a girl).

And here is the great Cantor Gideon Zelermyer, who won a Grammy for his participation in Leonard’s famous final song, “You Want It Darker”. Zelermyer sings the powerful and haunting “Hineni” riff.

Zelermyer is a local hero who also sings the national anthem for the Montreal Canadiens at Montreal’s Bell Centre.

“Hineni” means “Here I am,” and it’s what Abraham told God when he presented himself to sacrifice his son Isaac. In the song, the 82-year old, cancer-ridden Leonard offers up himself: “Hineni, hineni…I’m ready, my Lord.”

He died a few weeks before the song’s release.

And here is Leonard’s beloved son, Adam Cohen, singing his heart at the memorial concert!

(photographer unknown)

Adam also invited the great Rufus Wainwright onstage for a glorious rendition of Leonard’s cold and broken Hallelujah. I thought I’d heard this sublime song one too many times for it to land…but no. Wainwright’s voice reached the Place, and brought down the blessings.

(photographer unknown)

May Leonard Cohen rest in peace, here at the Shaar Hashomayim Cemetery, alongside his parents, grandparents and great-grandparents, on the northern slope of Montreal’s Mont Royal.

I hope you enjoyed this pictorial pilgrimage to Leonard Cohen’s Montreal as much as I enjoyed making it.

If you’d like to attend one of Adam Cohen’s memorial concerts honoring his father, you can find out more here. It was so good to be in the presence of the other concert-goers who loved him. It was a kind-hearted and soulful crowd.

And let me know if there were any aspects of this tour in particular that you enjoyed!

And what music (or other experience) brings down the blessings for you?