Alvin Sugarman as I Knew Him
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From Where I SitOpinion

Alvin Sugarman as I Knew Him

Rabbi was the right job for this nice Jewish boy.

Dave Schechter is a veteran journalist whose career includes writing and producing reports from Israel and elsewhere in the Middle East.

Dave Schechter
Dave Schechter

My first encounter with Rabbi Alvin Marx Sugarman came many years ago, not in Atlanta, but at a Reform synagogue north of Chicago where my family had been members.

Sugarman, then senior rabbi at The Temple, had come north to co-officiate at the wedding of a member of The Temple staff who also grew up in that congregation.

Several years ago, I told him: “Rabbi, you co-officiated at [the bride’s] wedding. I confess that until that occasion I had never heard Hebrew spoken with a Southern accent. So, if you recall anyone snickering, it was me, and I apologize.”

He laughed and asked how long I had been in Atlanta. “I’m a relative newcomer. I’ve only been here about 30 years,” I answered, eliciting another chuckle.

Sugarman died Jan. 17 at age 86.

A friend of mine, who is not Jewish but credits Sugarman with playing a significant role in his life, called him “my rabbi.”

He was as kind a man as I have known.

When I messaged him in June 2015 for an article about the centennial of Leo Frank’s lynching, he begged off for a few days, as he and his wife, Barbara, were on a 50th anniversary trip in the Berkshires.

Having been married just 30 years at the time I interrupted his anniversary trip, I asked for the key of marital longevity.

“Secret: Laugh a lot” was his response.

Rabbi Alvin Sugarman, rabbi emeritus at The Temple // Photo courtesy of the William Breman Jewish Heritage Museum

Three weeks after he and Barbara married, Sugarman told his bride that he wanted to leave his mercantile job and attend rabbinical school, a calling that he felt as a teenager.

“What kind of a job is that for a nice Jewish boy?” an uncle asked.

After his ordination in 1971, Sugarman came home to The Temple, his childhood congregation, as assistant to Rabbi Jacob Rothschild. Rothschild died on the last day of December 1973 and the following April, Sugarman was installed as senior rabbi.

At his installation as senior rabbi, Sugarman spoke of how Rabbi David Marx, Rothschild’s predecessor, had built bridges to other faith communities.

Jack Rothschild stood on that bridge and proclaimed with a prophetic voice the end of segregation in the South,” Sugarman said in a June 2020 interview. “At my installation, I said, ‘I’m standing on the bridge next to Rabbi Rothschild, but I’m crossing that bridge, and I want you, the congregation, to take my hand and walk with me.’”

In the summer of 2020, as numerous Atlanta rabbis joined civil rights marches in the streets of Atlanta, I asked Rothschild’s widow, Janice Rothschild Blumberg (who died in February 2024), whether these rabbis stood on the figurative shoulders of her husband.

“Absolutely,” she said. “But don’t forget to credit Alvin with keeping it going and building on it when it was still precedent-breaking to some extent. I thought he did a fabulous job of following in Jack’s path but with his own footsteps.”

Those footsteps included a January 1987 march in Forsyth County, where in 1912 more than 1,000 Black residents fled racial violence. “I did my shoe leather,” Sugarman told me.

In email after email, and every time I spoke with him on the phone or in person, Sugarman always extended his greetings to include my wife, Audrey.

In April 2017, Sugarman gave Atlanta’s AIB Network a four-hour tour of the Atlanta he grew up in. I tagged along as Audrey, then AIB’s content manager, drove and interviewed Sugarman, and a videographer recorded his memories.

His stories were poignant and humorous.

He pointed out an apartment building on Boulevard, in midtown Atlanta, where he lived as a boy, and recalled the last kiss he received from his mother, who died of breast cancer when he was 5 years old and discussed his late father’s struggles with mental health challenges. The latter, a “complicated relationship,” he called it, made him more empathetic when congregants came to him to discuss mental health issues.

As the tour continued down Ponce de Leon Avenue, Sugarman said, “The older you get, the buildings that were so much of your life evaporate and morph into something else.”

Where his elementary school stood, there was now a fast food restaurant. Another restaurant had replaced a barbershop, a church stood at the location of a movie theater (where Sugarman recalled receiving an early lesson in unrequited love), and a shopping plaza sits where the Atlanta Crackers minor-league baseball team played.

The tour also included where his parents operated a store, the Southern 5 & 10, on Georgia Avenue, and various places where he played and engaged in youthful mischief.

“It is amazing, when you really think about a life, the things that stick with you,” he said.

In our last email exchange, in late December, he wished us “a joyous, and a blessed Hanukkah and a new year filled with joy and happiness.”

His memory truly will be a blessing.

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