Saving Monticello: The Newsletter
The latest about
the book, author events, and more
Newsletter Editor
- Marc Leepson
Volume XXII, Number 10 October 2025
ALONG
AMERICAN LINES: In my continuing effort to unearth new (to me)
material about the Levys and Monticello, I recently learned of a very accomplished
friend of Jefferson Monroe Levy’s whom I had never come across before: Rabbi
Rudolph Coffee, a prominent early 20th century religious leader from
Oakland, California.
I discovered Rabbi Coffee (below) after reading a letter to the
editor he wrote to the Oakland Tribune in August 1921—the year Jefferson
Levy officially put Monticello on the market. His decision to do so followed
failed efforts that had begun in 1912 in Congress to enact legislation that
would have condemned Monticello and turned it into a government-run house
museum.
In his letter, Coffee, 43, who had become the rabbi of Oakland’s
Temple Sinai earlier that year, spoke out in favor of recent proposals for the government
to purchase Monticello from Jefferson Levy. Describing himself as “knowing the
present owner very well,” the Rabbi enumerated his reasons why the government should
acquire the house and grounds.
For one thing, he wrote, Levy was offering the property to the government at a price well below its value, which he said was “nearly” $3 million. He also suggested that government ownership of Monticello would be the appropriate way to honor Thomas Jefferson, whom he characterized as “a great statesman” and a man with “genuinely liberal religious ideas.”
Coffee’s main argument, though, centered on Thomas
Jefferson, self-taught architect. As the Rabbi put it: Jefferson was “one of
the leading, and also the first of American architects to work along purely
American lines.” He credited Jefferson with creating what he called “the
colonial mansion,” and wrote that there was “no better example of it” than
Monticello, which he described as a “remarkable spot, with so remarkable a
building,” and a “sacred treasure” that the government should acquire so the
house and grounds could “belong to the all the people… under government
protection.”
The government never did buy Monticello. And two years later,
Jefferson Levy sold the property, along with Monticello’s furniture and
furnishings, for $500,000 to the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation. That
private, nonprofit group had been founded that year for the purpose of
purchasing Monticello. The Foundation has owned Monticello since December 1923,
and as anyone who has visited knows, has cared for the house and grounds exceptionally
well.
***************
As for Rudolph Coffee, he led a remarkable life. Born in
Oakland in 1878, he graduated from Oakland High School, along with his friend,
the famed novelist Jack London. He left California to attend Columbia
University, earning a BA in 1900. He then studied at the Jewish School of
Theology in New York, became a rabbi, and later, in 1908, received a PhD
in philosophy from the University of Pittsburgh.
In 1907, he had become the rabbi of Tree of Life
Congregation, a Conservative synagogue founded in 1864 in Pittsburgh—and unhappily
remembered today as the scene of a horrendous 2018 attack in which a man shot
and killed 11 congregants and wounded six others.
Rabbi
Coffee left Pittsburgh in 1915 to become the head of Social Service Department
of B’Nai B’rith, the Jewish social services organization, in Washington, D.C.,
in 1915. He moved to Chicago later that year, along with his wife Doris and
their children.
But tragedy soon struck. Doris Coffee died at 27, on January
25, 1916. Following her funeral in San Francisco, Rudolph Coffee returned to
Chicago and served as the rabbi of Temple Judea for three years, then moved to
Toledo to lead Collingwood Avenue Temple, before returning to the Bay area in
1921.
That’s when he took over as the rabbi at Temple Sinai in Oakland and wound up serving in that position until 1933. The temple (above), founded in 1875 as the First Hebrew Congregation of Oakland, an orthodox synagogue, had become a Reform Judaism congregation in 1910. Among its noted congregants: East Oakland resident Gertrude Stein who attended as a child.
Coffee, Temple Sinai’s official history notes, was “a
powerful speaker,” using his sermons to comment on the issues of the day. He
committed himself and the Temple to causes on both the national and local
levels. His passions included opposition to the death penalty and prohibition.
He also responded to the growing antisemitism in the nation.”
After
leaving Temple Sinai in 1933, Dr. Coffee did not return to the rabbinate.
Instead, he took leadership positions in several Bay Area nonprofits. That
included serving as secretary of the San Francisco Conference of
Christians and Jews from 1934–39, and as a member of the State Board of
Charities and Corrections from 1924–31.
In 1934, he became the first Jewish chaplain of the newly opened federal penitentiary on Alcatraz Island. In 1942, he was named chaplain at San Quentin and Folsom prisons and held those jobs till his death in 1955.
 |
| Officials at the opening of Alcatraz, 1934 |
******************
WHAT A SUIT: I often describe
Jefferson M. Levy, who made a fortune as a real estate and stock speculator, as
a late 19th and early 20th century “jet-setter.” That’s
because he traveled in high style extensively in the U.S. and in Europe,
entertained lavishly at his townhouse in Manhattan and at Monticello, and
otherwise lived an upper-crust lifestyle.
I included a few
examples of Levy’s extravagances in the book. Such as him being the proud owner of a $30,000 sable overcoat,
which I read about in an article in the New York World in 1913. Levy, the newspaper’s Washington correspondent wrote,
bragged that the coat was the “finest piece of sable in existence, but would
not say whether he had bought the coat or someone gave it to him.”
The reporter speculated that the fancy garment might have been a gift
from J.P. Morgan, the Sultan of Turkey, or the Duke of Sutherland, and went to
describe the sultan and duke as “gentlemen in whose acquaintance Mr. Levy
revels.”
Not in the book: an item in the society column in the Orange
(Virginia) Observer from March 1891 that I just discovered with another example
of Jefferson Levy’s fondness for the better things in life. According to the item,
Jefferson Levy was the proud possessor of a suit that was “an exact counterpart
of that worn by” Thomas Jefferson when he was the U.S. minister (ambassador) at
the French Court of King Louis XVI from 1784 to 1789 when the French Revolution
broke out.
The suit, the newspaper reported,
“consists of a coat and knee breeches of white brocaded silk with silver sword
and decorations, all set in diamonds.”
Though I’m no fan of AI, I think for historical purposes the
generated image (left) is a fair representation of how Jefferson would have appeared in
a white silk suit, sword at his side—though I’m fairly certain he wouldn’t have
been carrying a sword around in Paris.
When I asked C-GPT to come up with an image of Jefferson
Levy in the same suit, it came up a similar image, but with a face that looked
more like Thomas Jefferson than Jefferson Levy. So,
no deep fake there.
EVENTS & COMMERCE: I have a good number of events scheduled the rest of the year, most of them on Lafayette: Idealist General, my concise biography of the famed Marquis, and my latest book, The Unlikely War Hero, a slice-of-life biography of the extraordinary Vietnam War story of Doug Hegdahl, the youngest and lowest-ranking American prisoner held in Hanoi during the war.
I’m also doing talks, podcasts, and other events for the new paperback edition of Lafayette: Idealist General and, of course, Saving Monticello. Many are speaking engagements for historic preservation and other groups. Most are open to the public. For details, go to: marcleepson.com/events
If you’d like to arrange a talk on The Unlikely War Hero, Saving Monticello, Lafayette, or any of my other books, please email me at marcleepson@gmail.com
To order signed copies from my website, go to https://bit.ly/BookOrdering
