I'm not familiar with this phone, so can't give very specific suggestions. But "losing root" isn't the issue: it is the ROM that has root access, whereas you need to use CWM to flash a ROM that works (and CWM doesn't care about the state of the ROM).
Were there any error messages when you flashed the ROM? And was that ROM for this exact model of phone (sorry, I know that's a stupid question, but people do sometimes get confused and flash a ROM for a similar phone) and did you check the MD5 of the .zip (to check you had a good download)? This is just trying to work out what went wrong and whether it's worth trying again with that ROM.
Anyway, it's saveable, the question is just finding something that works. Have you tried wiping cache from CWM? A long shot, but quick, simple and safe. But I think the relevant questions are probably "which CWM version are you using?" and "have you tried a different recovery (e.g. TWRP)?". Note that a recovery really has to be built for that specific phone model! The reason I ask though is that I've seen a number of these where using a different recovery, or different version of the recovery, is the key to fixing it. Unfortunately I've no experience at all with this phone (or with Samsung phones per se), so can't advise on which is the best recovery for this. But that might be the thing I'd look into.
