To build up an exhibition marking a milestone birthday, Temple Emanu-El on Manhattan’s Upper East Side borrowed a portrait of one of its storied members from its regular home 20 blocks north.
“I am thrilled that for the first time, we have a loan from the Metropolitan Museum of Art,” Warren Klein, the director and curator of the synagogue’s Herbert and Eileen Bernard Museum of Judaica, said on Monday as he opened the exhibition focused on Jews in the Gilded Age, when the Reform congregation constructed its lavish building.
The portrait is of Frieda Warburg Schiff (1876-1958), philanthropist and the daughter of banker Jacob Schiff, one of the Jewish titans of the period of rapid economic growth in the United States, from about the late 1870s to the late 1890s…