Carole Karp Cohen, soup kitchen volunteer and advocate for homeless people, dies at 84

Carole Karp Cohen operated with a moral compass focused on helping others in need. She volunteered at a Glen Cove soup kitchen, first serving guests meals, then cooking for them. She searched the woods in the Glen Cove area to respond to the needs of homeless people. She helped form a homeless shelter.

When asked why she routinely did those things, her daughters said, she responded simply: "'Because it was the right thing to do.'" 

"She always advocated for people," said daughter Laura Cohen, of Brooklyn, who does social service work herself. "She devoted herself wholeheartedly to it."

Carole Karp Cohen died of cancer in her Great Neck home on Oct. 6. She was 84.

Laura Cohen said her mother started out at the North Shore Soup Kitchen in Glen Cove serving meals as a volunteer in 1989. "Then she started in the kitchen cooking once a week, then it was teaching English. Then she started just becoming what she considered an advocate. When someone got arrested they would call her."

Laura Cohen said sometimes her mother would "get a call to go out into the woods" to meet someone. "She was just so completely dedicated."

Another daughter, Deborah Cohen, of Northampton, Massachussets, noted how the family was concerned about those trips to the woods. "Oh my gosh, it made all of us crazy. My father and I used to beg her not to do that and we gave her pepper spray," which her mother gave away, she said.

"Everything she did was about peace and justice and bringing people together and trying to heal the world," Deborah Cohen said, noting her mother advocated for the oppressed internationally as well. "I really think it was her experience growing up in a family that escaped the pogroms [in Russia] and informed her understanding of racism. She  believed, in her core, that silence was complicity. … We all had an obligation to stop injustice."

The family said Cohen was a first-generation American born in New York City and raised in the Bronx and Queens. Her parents, Beatrice and Edward Karp, fled the anti-Jewish pogroms that killed tens of thousands during the Russian Civil War between 1918 and 1920.

Cohen attended Queens College, and received her master's in education from Bank Street College of Education in Manhattan. She taught Pre-K at the Little Red School House in Manhattan until she married Dr. Richard Cohen in 1962, who preceded her in death in 2015. They were married 52 years. Her son, Jonathan Cohen, also preceded her in death, in 2003, as did an unofficially adopted son, Michael Lofton, in 2020.

Other volunteers at the North Shore Soup Kitchen recalled Cohen's fierce advocacy. 

"She was a remarkable woman," said Vivienne Lipsitz.  "She was adored by the patrons who came to the kitchen. I’ve never known anybody quite like her. She took them under her wing. She fed them. She clothed them. She went to court with them," added Lipsitz, of Floral Park. "She was an inspiration."

Estelle Moore of Glen Cove, president emeritus of the soup kitchen, said Cohen "was a very kind and loving person. She was all heart. She cared deeply for the guests. We call them guests. Those are the people who need our help and she did all she could to help them solve problems."

Deborah Cohen said she and her siblings have internalized their mother's advocacy message. "Mom instilled in all of us our life’s work should be about healing the world." Cohen owns a diversity consultancy and training company, and noted her sister's work in human services. Additionally, she said her late brother counseled men who had been violent toward women.

Cohen's survivors include her daughters, their partners, a sister-in-law and one grandchild. 

A memorial celebration is planned for spring 2023.

By Olivia Winslow

olivia.winslow@newsday.com@newsollie