shipping and entertainment. It had waves of immigration of Jews and Catholics from eastern and southern Europe. Cohen worked to ease relations between German Jews in Texas, who had joined the Reform movement and become quite established, and the new Jewish immigrants from eastern Europe, who were generally Orthodox, Yiddish-speaking, and generally from small shtetls with different cultures. Cohen and his congregation helped Galveston to rebuild after the devastating damage and thousands of deaths from the Hurricane of 1900. They were committed to staying in the city. With others, Cohen organized the Galveston Movement, leading it from 1907-1914. The Jewish Immigrant Information Bureau worked to attract Jews emigrating from the Russian Empire and eastern Europe to Galveston and the Gulf Coast; many had been entering the already crowded East Coast cities, such as New York City, Philadelphia, and Boston, which were better known as destinations. Cohen and other Texas Jewish leaders wanted not only to strengthen Jewish communities in Texas and the center of the country, but to lessen potential conflicts arising from heavy immigration to the Northeast and to prevent restrictions on immigration being passed by Congress. He and others worked to resettle Jews in the middle of the country, from the Mississippi River west to the Rocky Mountains. Ten thousand Jewish immigrants passed through Galveston during this era, approximately one-third the number who migrated to Palestine during the same period. Members of Cohen's congregation would meet Jewish immigrants arriving at the port, and help them find places to stay and work, as well as introduce them to their new society and help them adjust to the United States. The movement was often internally divided, and many European Jews were intent on reaching known industrial cities. Cohen personally petitioned President William Howard Taft on behalf of one immigrant to enable him to stay in the country. Cohen is known for having saved a Greek Catholic from being deported from Texas. He also worked to persuade the Galveston School Board to ban William Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice from the Galveston public schools, as he felt the character of Shylock was portrayed in an anti-Semitic way. Cohen served all the people, working to have the age of sexual consent raised from ten to eighteen for girls. He served on the state prison board for three decades, and achieved reforms: introducing vocational training, parole reforms, and separation of first offenders from