The son of Leonard Cohen, who died aged 82 last week, has revealed that the singer was buried next to his parents in a quiet ceremony in Montreal.
In a Facebook post, Adam Cohen said "with only immediate family and a few lifelong friends present, he was lowered into the ground in an unadorned pine box, next to his mother and father. Exactly as he’d asked.”
The traditional Jewish funeral is understood to have taken place on Thursday - before the announcement of Leonard Cohen’s death in Los Angeles on Monday - in a cemetery attached to the Conservative synagogue his family had long been associated with, Shaar Hashomayim.
Adam Cohen, who had helped with the recording of his father’s final album You Want It Darker, which was released only a few weeks before his death, wrote: “There’s so much I wish I could thank him for, just one last time. I’d thank him for the comfort he always provided, for the wisdom he dispensed, for the marathon conversations, for his dazzling wit and humour”.
Emeritus Chief Rabbi Lord Sacks has also paid tribute to the singer on Facebook, describing him as "a supreme musical poet, in sustained dialogue with his Jewish background, unorthodox but deeply mystical, whose works, like Hallelujah, and Who by Fire were dissident commentaries on Jewish prayer”.
Rabbi Sacks said “his last song was a way of saying Kaddish for himself, and was a fitting conclusion to an extraordinary career. He taught us that the cracks in our fractured world are where the light comes in. A unique voice that will long reverberate in the collective memory of a generation”.
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