3.10 Rabbi Alexander by Deborah Addison Coburn

The works by Washington, DC artist Deborah Addison Coburn interweave two generational threads in the tapestry of her personal family history. Both works are charcoal drawings on paper mounted on canvas, but the first also adds collage and kosher string and the second adds fabric and buttons. The first, “Rabbi Alexander,” is the artist’s great-great-grandfather, Rabbi Joel (Yoel) Alexander, from the town of Posen, in Prussia. He studied at the Yeshiva in Munster and was subsequently ordained as a rabbi by the “great rabbis of Posen and Rabbi Marcus Adler, Chief Rabbi of the United Kingdom.” Coming to New York during the mid-century immigration wave of central European Jews, mainly from Prussia and Austro-Hungary, he was appointed as the first fulltime rabbi at Baith Israel—known as the Mother Synagogue of Brooklyn, as the oldest Jewish congregation in the borough—and subsequently served as rabbi of the first synagogue in Memphis, during the last four years or so of his brief life: he died in Memphis at the age of 43, and is buried there.

The portrait by his great-great-granddaughter offers a handsome, somewhat stern face, surrounded by markers of his passage through the world—from small images of the Old World rabbis who trained him, to various texts, including public documents in German and English referring to his accomplishments; to a picture of the Baith Israel congregation’s second independent structure, a landmark building known as the Boerum Place synagogue, built in1862 not far from Brooklyn’s city hall; to an image of the old, neo-Islamic-Romanesque-styled synagogue in Memphis, with is monumental keyhole arch main doorway; to the Memphis gravestone that tells us that he lived form 1823-66, and offers an inscription extolling him for his righteousness and justice, and declaring that the “entire nation of Israel eulogized him as a loyal shepherd.”