Remembering Rabbi Alvin Sugarman
Rabbi Alvin Marx Sugarman, of The Temple, left an indelible impact on the Atlanta Jewish community.
Dave Schechter is a veteran journalist whose career includes writing and producing reports from Israel and elsewhere in the Middle East.
![“These rabbis, the ones who have the guts to speak out now, they’re standing on his [Rothschild’s] shoulders,” said Rabbi Alvin Sugarman, rabbi emeritus at The Temple. “These rabbis, the ones who have the guts to speak out now, they’re standing on his [Rothschild’s] shoulders,” said Rabbi Alvin Sugarman, rabbi emeritus at The Temple.](https://static.timesofisrael.com/atlantajewishtimes/uploads/2024/05/BRIEF_Rabbi-Sugerman-NIF-Tzedek-Awards-Photo-1-1-640x400.jpg)
“I put on my pants one leg at a time. I’m just one guy, trying to make sense of this chaos we call life.”
That is how Rabbi Alvin Marx Sugarman, of The Temple, described himself in a 2015 interview with Atlanta’s AIB Network.
Sugarman engaged in that quest from childhood until his death on Jan. 17 at age 86.
An Atlantan through and through, Sugarman’s association with The Temple was life-long, including his 53 years as a rabbi.
When he was born on June 3, 1938, the city’s Jewish population was 12,000, less than 10 percent of its estimated size today. Seven years earlier, The Temple, the city’s oldest Jewish congregation (founded in 1867 as the Hebrew Benevolent Society), had relocated from the intersection of South Pryor and Richardson streets to its current Peachtree Street home.
“As a city and as a community we evolve and change, and that’s what makes us human,” Sugarman told AIB. “Atlanta was a little village compared with what it is today.”
Sugarman began questioning “this chaos we call life” as a 5-year-old, when his mother, Helene Marx Sugarman, died in December 1943 of breast cancer at age 41.

A well-meaning relative told him that G-d needed his mother in heaven. “Even at age 5, how could it be that G-d needed my mommy more than I needed her?” Sugarman said as he discussed his spiritual journey.
In the spring of 2017, during a driving tour of the Atlanta he knew growing up, Sugarman said, “Addresses are so much more than a street number.” He pointed to the second floor of an apartment at 571 Boulevard, where he lived for a time as a boy, and recalled the last kiss he received from his mother.
Sugarman’s parents operated the Southern Five & Ten Cent Store on Georgia Avenue.
His father, Meyer Sugarman, struggled with mental illness until his death from heart disease in January 1964 at age 71. “He did his absolute best in raising me,” with the support of other family members, Sugarman said.
“To say it was a complicated relationship is an understatement, but it certainly helped me understand when a congregant came to see me and open up about his or her problems” with mental illness, Sugarman said in a 2020 interview with The Blue Dove Foundation.
Looking back, Sugarman could see how events years earlier led him to the rabbinate.

As an 8- or 9-year-old, he felt Rabbi Jacob Rothschild, of The Temple, addressing him directly during a High Holiday service. “He held the Torah and said: ‘It is a tree of life, to those who hold fast.’ And I felt this chill,” Sugarman said.
Following his confirmation at age 16, he delivered a sermon at a BBYO (B’nai B’rith Youth Organization) Shabbat service at Congregation Shearith Israel, speaking on “religion as a source of comfort during your darkest hours.” Afterward, the president of B’nai B’rith Women tearfully told him how she was moved by his words.
That was the moment Sugarman wondered whether he might want to be a rabbi. As a student at Emory University, he picked up a classmate’s brochure about Hebrew Union College and wrote — but did not mail — a letter to the seminary.
Travails with chemistry ended thoughts of becoming a doctor and he graduated with a degree in business. After Emory, he worked for six years for the Montag Bros. school supply and paper company as a salesman and as advertising and sales promotion manager.
On Sunday, Dec. 27, 1964, Sugarman was set up on a blind date with Barbara Dee Herman, who hailed from Jackson, Miss., and was in Atlanta visiting family. “After dinner and dancing, midnight coffee, we stayed up all night talking . . . We both knew that night,” Barbara told the AJT in 2018.
Sugarman proposed that Thursday. “I knew a good thing when I saw it,” he said often.

They married on May 8, 1965, in Jackson. Three weeks later, over lunch at Mary Mac’s Tea Room on Ponce de Leon Avenue, Sugarman told his bride that, at age 27, he wanted to exchange the mercantile world for rabbinical school.
“Honestly, I loved working for Montag, but coming home, I just told Barbara, I said, ‘I don’t know how many more days I can take of deciding whether we should pack this six white, three blue and three pink, or six white, three blue and three lilac,’ you know? There just was something stirring inside of me,” Sugarman said in an oral history interview done for the Cuba Archives for Southern Jewry at the Breman Museum.
Sugarman recounted Rothschild’s reaction: “He almost fell out of the chair because, he said truthfully, that I had never said a word to him about becoming a rabbi.”
An uncle’s asked: “What kind of job is that for a nice Jewish boy?”
Sugarman was ordained at the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, the Reform movement’s seminary in Cincinnati. Years later, he earned a Ph.D. in theological studies from Emory.
Three weeks after his ordination in 1971, Sugarman returned to The Temple as an assistant rabbi. Rothschild died on Dec. 31, 1973, and in April 1974, Sugarman became senior rabbi. He took on emeritus status in 2004, during the next few years serving congregations in Santa Barbara, Calif., and Florence, S.C.
Sugarman was attending a New Year’s Eve party in Jackson, Miss., when he received a call from a tearful Robert Lipshutz, then president of The Temple, informing him of Rothschild’s death.
“The night that I was installed [April 26, 1974] I spoke about [Rabbi] David Marx building a bridge to the greater community, Jack [Rothschild] walking over the bridge, and my standing on the other side of the bridge to my congregation, beckoning them to join me,” Sugarman said in the oral history.
Like his predecessor, Sugarman was active in promoting civil rights.
“A major element of my involvement was Dr. [Martin Luther] King speaking in Alabama. My territory, as a traveling salesman, was in Alabama before becoming a rabbi, and you could witness the hatred on the part of some of the people in Alabama,” Sugarman said in 2022 interview with a New York University journalism program publication. “My dad died in 1964, and I started teaching religious school to eighth graders — just as a volunteer — and my subject was the prophets and their calls for social justice. The Klu Klux Klan was meeting at Stone Mountain, and I would tell my students “if Amos (the biblical prophet) were around what would he tell the Klu Klux Klan?”
When 29 Black adolescents and young adults were murdered in Atlanta between July 1979 and May 1981, Sugarman urged Temple congregants “to participate in the reward fund and talk to their friends in the Black community to let them know that they did care, and we are one community.”
The late Janice Rothschild Blumberg told the AJT in 2020 that her husband lamented being unable to participate in civil rights marches, for concern about how such activity would be received by his congregants.

Sugarman was less constrained. “I did my shoe leather,” he told the AJT, including participation in a January 1987 civil rights march in Forsyth County. “We share a history of oppression with Blacks. It’s in different forms and to different degrees, but we know what it means to be in an underclass, to be oppressed solely by virtue of birth –- we as Jews, they as Blacks,” he said.
Sugarman was senior rabbi when, in 1979, The Temple hired Rabbi Beverly Lerner, believed to have been Atlanta’s first female rabbi. “Alvin Sugarman gave me quite a bit of freedom to do what I wanted. He asked what I was most interested in,” she told the AJT in 2021.
On the silver screen, Sugarman appeared in the film “Driving Miss Daisy,” based on the play written by Alfred Uhry, who grew up in The Temple. Scenes were set at The Temple, and Sugarman had a cameo as a rabbi — who calls himself Dr. Weil — leading the congregation in prayer.
He also was interviewed for “Shared Legacies,” a 2020 documentary about the relationship between the Jewish and Black communities, focusing on Atlanta and the civil rights movement.
Sugarman reflected on his career in a 2021 article for the Central Conference of American Rabbis. “If there is such a phenomenon as a spiritual journey, I cannot think of a better way to do just that than being a congregational rabbi. For not only have I experienced my own spiritual life, but I have tasted the spiritual lives of my members.
“I tried my best to keep not only the words of the prophets alive, but to turn those words into deeds, such as helping create a shelter for homeless couples and a shelter for homeless newborns and their families. What wisdom did I learn? I learned when people are given a chance to allow the goodness of their hearts to bloom, they will do so . . . I pray that my rabbinate has been pleasing in God’s eyes,” he wrote.
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