Rabbi Sidney A. Wolf

Wolf spent a dozen years trying to start a symphony before the town could support one. In the 1930s the best pipe organ in Corpus Christi belonged to a movie palace, and he met Sunday afternoons with the Episcopal rector William Capers Munds to play records. In 1945 a new music department at the junior college made it possible, and Wolf took the fundraising as founding president of the symphony society. A first $6,500 in gifts launched a sixty-three-member orchestra, which played its first concert on December 10, 1945, in the high school auditorium.

What the plaque says

Rabbi Sidney A. Wolf Born in Cleveland, Ohio, on December 8, 1906, Sidney Wolf spent his childhood developing his skills as a pianist. In high school, he conceived the idea of using his musical talent to enhance a career as a rabbi. He studied Music at the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music and German at the University of Cincinnati, and received his ordination from Cincinnati's Hebrew Union College in 1932. That same year, he accepted a three month trial as rabbi for the new Temple Beth El in Corpus Christi. The trial turned into a forty-year career for Rabbi Wolf, who retired from the pulpit in 1972. During his tenure at Temple Beth El, Rabbi Wolf became known for his interfaith work and, in the era of Jim Crow segregation, for his support of integration of public facilities, such as the public golf course and at Temple Beth El. Beginning with Pastor Sidney Smith in 1950, the rabbi regularly invited African American pastors and choirs to worship, preach and sing at the temple. With Episcopal Rev. William Munds, he organized the country's earliest interfaith services; they preached from each other's pulpits on alternate Thanksgivings. In addition to serving his congregation and on many charitable boards, Rabbi Wolf shared his love of music with his community. In 1945, after years of effort, he helped organize the Corpus Christi Symphony Orchestra, which he promoted tirelessly. Shortly after their son's birth in 1936, his wife, Sarah Phillips, died. Rabbi Wolf remarried in 1938 to Bertha "Bebe" Rosenthal, also an accomplished musician. A daughter was added to their family in 1940. Before his death in 1983, Rabbi Wolf received numerous local and national honors for his humanitarian work. (2014)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Mirador de la Flor — 4.7 mi
  Corpus Christi's bayfront memorial to Selena Quintanilla-Pérez, the Tejano singer from this city, killed in 1995 at twenty-three, visited by about thirty thousand people a year.
• Art Museum of South Texas — 5.6 mi
  Philip Johnson's 1972 museum on the Corpus Christi bayfront, joined in 2006 by Ricardo Legorreta's Miller Wing, holding more than 2,000 works mostly from Texas and the Americas.
• Texas State Aquarium — 5.8 mi
  A nonprofit aquarium on the tip of Corpus Christi Beach built around the Gulf and the Caribbean, with the largest coastal wildlife rescue center in Texas behind the exhibits.
• USS Lexington Museum on the Bay — 5.8 mi
  An Essex-class carrier of 1943 moored off North Beach, the Blue Ghost that Tokyo Rose kept reporting sunk, and the Navy's training carrier for nearly three decades after.

More markers nearby

• General W.W. Sterling — steps away
• Elihu Harrison Ropes — 1.6 mi
• Clara Driscoll, The Driscoll Foundation and Driscoll Children's Hospital — 1.6 mi
• Alta Vista Hotel, Site of — 2.1 mi