By Ron Kampeas

(JTA) — Leonard Cohen, the Canadian singer songwriter whose Jewish-infused work became a soundtrack for melancholy, died Monday, Nov. 7 at the age of 82. Cohen died in Los Angeles and was buried in Montreal in the family plot hours before his death was made public.

“My father passed away peacefully at his home in Los Angeles with the knowledge that he had completed what he felt was one of his greatest records,” Cohen’s son, Adam, wrote in a Facebook post on Thursday following the funeral. “He was writing up until his last moments with his unique brand of humor.”

Cohen, born in 1934 in Montreal, was playing folk guitar by the time he was 15, when he learned the resistance song, “The Partisan,” working at a camp, from an older friend.

“We sang together every morning, going through The People’s Song Book from cover to cover,” he recalled in his first “Best Of” compilation in 1975. “I developed the curious notion that the Nazis were overthrown by music.”

As a student at McGill University, he became part of Montreal’s burgeoning alternative art scene, one bursting with nervous energy at a time that tensions between Quebec’s French and English speakers were coming to the fore.

His influences included Irving Layton, the seminal Canadian Jewish poet who taught at McGill, and like Cohen, grappled with the tensions between the secular world and the temptations of faith.

He began to publish poetry and then novels, and was noticed by the national Canadian press. Moving to New York in the late 1960s (his song, “Chelsea Hotel,” is about his stay at that notorious refuge for the inspired, the insane and the indigent), he began to put his words to music.

“Suzanne,” about the devastating platonic affair with a friend’s wife that was a factor in his leaving Montreal, was recorded by Judy Collins and became a hit; his career was launched.

Cohen embraced Buddhism, but never stopped saying he was Jewish. His music more often than not dealt directly not just with his faith, but with his Jewish people’s story. His most famous song, covered hundreds of times, is “Hallelujah” – he has said its unpublished verses are endless, but in its recorded version it is about the sacred anguish felt by King David as he contemplates the beauty of the forbidden Bathsheba.

“First We Take Manhattan,” recorded in the late 1980s when Cohen was living much of his time in Europe, plumbs the anger of a modern Jew traveling through a postwar consumerist Europe that has become adept at ignoring its Jewish ghosts.

Cohen was droll, but also reverent: Each of his explanations of his songs on 1975’s “Best Of” is sardonic except for one, for “Who by Fire”: “This is based on a prayer recited on the Day of Atonement,” was all he wrote.

Cohen, in his 70s in the late 2000s, began once again to tour and record; a manager had bilked him of much of his fortune. He released his final album, “You Want It Darker,” last month.

He often toured Israel, and he expressed his love for the country — he toured for troops in the 1973 Yom Kippur War — but he also expressed sadness at the militarism he encountered there. Under pressure from the boycott Israel movement to cancel a 2009 concert, he instead donated its (much needed by him) proceeds to a group that advances dialogue between Palestinians and Jews. Tickets to the stadium at Ramat Gan sold out in minutes. His Israeli fans embraced him that September night, and he returned the love, sprinkling the concert with Hebrew and readings from scripture and ending it with the blessing of the Kohens.

On Friday, Nov. 11, following the announcement of Cohen’s death, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu praised Cohen as “a talented artist and warmhearted Jew who loved the people of Israel and the state of Israel.”

“I will never forget how he came during the Yom Kippur War to sing to our troops because he felt he was a partner,” tweeted Netanyahu, who was a soldier in that war in 1973.

President Reuven Rivlin also took to Facebook Friday, writing about himself and his wife, Nechama: “This morning we looked at each other and thought the same thoughts: ‘Dance Me to the End of Love’ was the soundtrack to so many moments in our life as a couple and as a family. It added, like so many of his songs, a spirit and depth of emotion into our everyday lives. … How sad to part from this man whose voice and face accompanied us for so many years. A giant of a creator, open to all people, who also knew how to accompany the State of Israel in the fields of battle and in times of growth.”

In August he wrote an emotional letter to his former girlfriend and muse Marianne Ihlen, who died in late July, suggesting he too was ready to embrace his death.

Last month, in a profile of Cohen in The New Yorker, Bob Dylan compared his fellow singer-songwriter to Irving Berlin – linking three iconic Jewish musicians in one poignant assessment.

Cohen was buried at the Shaar Hashomayim cemetery in Montreal, his hometown, according to reports citing a statement from Congregation Shaar Hashomayim, an Orthodox synagogue in the Westmount neighborhood of Montreal.

“Leonard’s wish was to be laid to rest in a traditional Jewish rite beside his parents, grandparents and great-grandparents,” the statement said. He maintained “a lifelong spiritual, musical, and familial connection to the synagogue of his youth.”

“Hineni, hineni, My Lord” and other lyrics to the song “You Want it Darker” from his latest album released in September were read during the traditional Jewish graveside funeral attended by family and close friends only, the French news service AFP reported.

In addition to his son, Cohen is survived by a daughter.