Rabbi Joseph Trostmann was the head of the local Yeshivah in Akkerman, a small Black Sea port, in the early decades of the 20th Century. His granddaughter, Ottilie Tolansky (nee Pincasovitch) remembered him from when she was a child, and many years later she painted two portraits of him based on a combination of her recollections and a family photograph. These portraits, painted in the early 1960s, probably around 1962 or 1963, were virtually identical: one was bought by the Stoke-on-Trent Art Gallery, and the other was retained in the family. At the artist’s death, her son Jonathan Tolansky inherited the second portrait, which he donated to the Ben Uri Gallery.