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Galveston’s
Rabbi Henry Cohen: The Quintessential Texas Rabbi.
A Reverence for
Art in Lubbock: Rabbi Alexander Kline.
“In
all the state of Texas from Fort
Worth to San Anton’
There’s not a man who hasn’t heard of Rabbi Henry
Cohen”
He was the dean of Lone Star rabbis. The ultimate Jewish star.
The chief rabbi of Texas. Not that such a position exists, but during six
decades in Galveston, Rabbi Henry Cohen grew into that role. More than seniority
earned him his status. Texas shaped and seasoned his style. Serving in Galveston
from 1888 to 1952, this Londoner with a puckish flair and an unshakable faith in
God became the epitome of a twentieth-century Lone Star rabbi—a pastor to all
the people (he saved a Greek Catholic from deportation); a defender of Judaism
(he banished Shakespeare’s Shylock from the Galveston public schools); a
partner to the Christian clergy (his best friend was a priest); and a lobbyist
from City Hall to Capitol Hill.
He
was not “too” Jewish: No beard. No prayer shawl. No guttural accent—just a
nervous stutter that he overcame. He was never a Zionist—a taboo among the socially assimilated Jews of the South. Rather than
rabbinical, he looked Episcopal, wearing a Prince Albert frock coat that he
called a “Prince Isaac.” His scholarship extended beyond the parochial to
encompass medicine, literature, Texas history, and a dozen foreign tongues.
In
a remote harbor of the Diaspora, the world came to him. During the Gay ’90s,
he befriended a papal emissary from Rome. In the ’30s, Readers’ Digest
ran an unforgettable profile. In the ’40s, NBC radio turned his biography, The
Man Who Stayed in Texas, into a half-hour broadcast. And in every decade,
novice Texas rabbis emulated and confided in him.
In
a state that prized mavericks over conformists, idiosyncrasies marked Cohen’s
style. He rode a bicycle, rather than a carriage, a trolley, or a car. He soiled
his starched white shirtcuffs with penciled lists of tasks to be done. He left a
trail of cigar ash as well as good deeds when he made his hospital rounds. A
spiritual giant but no saint, he was quick with a naughty limerick, thankful for
a midday shot of Scotch, and flattered when lipsticked ladies kissed him “good
Shabbos.” When he wandered
into an orphanage, he yelled “ice cream” to attract a crowd, and when a
priggish woman spent the night at his house, he dressed up a broom as a man and
tucked it into her bed .
More
concerned with individuals than ivory-tower causes, this rabbi succeeded at
both. He pressed for admission of an African American student to the local
medical school. He administered
Christian funeral rites to a whore. He
extended a handshake to 10,000 unscrubbed Jewish refugees who disembarked in
Galveston during the years before the first World War. A people’s lobbyist, he convinced the Texas Legislature to raise the age
of consent in rape cases from ten to eighteen, and during three decades on the
state prison board he instituted vocational training, parole reforms, and
separation of first offenders from seasoned criminals. Although he came of age
in an era of oratory and elocution, his sermons were short and direct. Henry
Cohen’s entire life was a homily that blended humanitarianism and
individualism, the ethics of Judaism with the ethos of Texas. . . . . .
A
lecture in longhand celebrating some ancient pharaoh’s tomb fills one page
of paper. The reverse side contains a different view of old age—a typewritten
note to Rabbi Alex Kline warning that his pension plan premium is past due.
Another sheet of paper outlines the Chinese dynasties from Shang to T’ang. The
flip side bears the orange-and-blue-logo of the Howard Johnson Motel where the
rabbi lodged when he penned those thoughts. A third set of notes explains
Buddhist art—on the back of a Girl Scout Council budget. And a
fourth—scribbled on the blank side of discarded circulars—follows
Cleopatra’s legend from hieroglyphics to Hollywood .
Aesthetic on one side, humdrum on the other, the art-history
files of Rabbi Alexander Stanley Kline fill sixty-eight dusty boxes stacked
against a wall at the Museum of Texas Tech University. Categorized by era and
artist, these archives preserve the junk mail, the far-away thoughts, and the
scholarly research of a small-town rabbi who recycled paper before the term was
coined and interpreted the art of the ages to a country-western town. Before he
died in 1982, Rabbi Alex Kline had spent the last two decades of his life
lecturing at the regional museum in Lubbock. There, in a room now named after
him, he enthralled West Texans with his humble, cut-and-pasted art collection: a
lifetime of illustrations clipped from books and magazines, each glued to
cardboard or brown paper and arranged in sequence to illustrate art from the
Pyramids to Picasso.
That Kline's title was rabbi—not curator or Ph.D. in art
history—concerned no one. “This is West Texas. Nobody cares about your
credentials if you can produce,” said Winifred Vigness, former director of the
West Texas Museum Association, which sponsored Kline’s lecture series. “If
you can build a better mousetrap, who cares if you went to Mousetrap
University?”
Moreover,
the rabbi’s expertise extended to music, literature, and philosophy. Eager to
share his insights, the rabbi broadened the avenue—from commerce to
culture—that linked Lubbock’s seventy-six Jewish families to the rest of the
populace. With Rabbi Kline at the lectern, fine arts became the region’s
universal religion.
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