Prinz, Joachim (1902–1988)

I. Family Background and Early Childhood
Joachim Prinz was born on May 10, 1902, in Bierdzan, a small Upper Silesian village of around 700 people, renamed Burkardsdorf in 1936. He was the first of four children. Kurt (1904), Hans (1906) and Dorothea (1915) followed him later. In 1910 the family moved to the district town Opole (Oppeln). His family was a quite typical German-Jewish family: middle class, bourgeois, German-national and secular. Like many others of his generation, Prinz rebelled against his parents, especially his father, by becoming a socialist and later an ardent Zionist. Furthermore, he developed an interest in Jewish religion and embarked on a rabbinical education at the Jewish Theological Seminary in Breslau in 1921.

II. Education and academic career 
From 1921 to 1927, Prinz was trained as a rabbi at the conservative Jewish Theological Seminary of Breslau and was enrolled at the University of Breslau for his secular education. In 1922, Prinz moved for one year to Berlin, taking classes at the liberal rabbinical school, the Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums and at Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität of Berlin. In the German capital, he explored the exciting nightlife and the many cultural and sexual opportunities of the metropolis but also experienced first-hand the tense political situation of the early 1920s and the antisemitic violence culminating in the murder of Walter Rathenau on June 24, 1922. After his return to Breslau, he became the editor of the Jüdische Zeitung für Ostdeutschland. In 1925, he transferred to the University of Gießen, where he completed his university studies, after which he moved to Berlin at the end of 1926. Here he took up his post as rabbi of the congregation Friedenstempel at the beginning of 1927, becoming the youngest rabbi in the city. By the beginning of 1927 he had already received his degree as Doctor of Philosophy from the University of Gießen and was now also officially ordained by the Breslau seminary.

III. Profession and Career before Emigration 
Within a short period of time, he became one of Berlin’s most popular rabbis.  His personality and his rabbinical style was significantly different to that of the Jewish establishment and spoke in particular to a younger generation. He would listen to people’s everyday concerns and turn synagogue worship into discussions about current issues. Prinz and his first wife Lucie (née Horovitz, 1902–1931), and after her death his second wife Hilde (née Goldschmidt, 1913–1994), enjoyed the opportunities of the metropolis without reservations. Prinz also reached out to the young generation as author of a children’s book on heroes and adventurers of the Bible (Helden und Abenteurer der Bibel 1930) and a popular interpretation of Jewish history (Jüdische Geschichte, 1931). From the first day at the Friedenstempel, Prinz found himself in a confrontation with the leadership of the Berlin Jewish Community (Gemeinde) and the liberal Jewish establishment. In July 1928, the formerly independent radical Reform synagogue of Friedenstempel was taken over by the Berlin Gemeinde. While Prinz remained rabbi of the congregation, he was not appointed Gemeinderabbiner, as a tenured employee of the Gemeinde. His status remained in limbo until his sacking in 1935. His Zionist outlook was one of many issues that had come between him and the Gemeinde. He also passionately pressed for a Jewish renaissance, namely a cultural, religious and national revival of Judaism in the diaspora.

After the Nazi regime came to power in 1933, Prinz rose to become of the most important but also one of the most controversial personalities of German Jewry, whose popularity soon spread far beyond Berlin and Germany. His book Wir Juden (We Jews), published at the end of 1933, was the Jewish book most discussed during the Nazi era. In it he argued vigorously for Jewish nationalism, for Palestine as a ‘solution to the Jewish question’ and against liberal Judaism, which he accused of ideological and political failure in the face of Nazi aggression. This posture made Prinz, together with the publisher of the Jüdische Rundschau, Robert Weltsch, one of the most important pillars of an increasingly bewildered Jewish population. However, Prinz was not only a political figure but also a rabbi who cared for his congregation and his sermons soon attracted large audiences far beyond his congregants.

But his popularity – both positive and negative – came at a price. In 1935, the Jewish Community of Berlin fired him as their rabbi – a remarkable move reflecting increasing Nazi pressure. After Prinz had consolidated his position as editor of the Israelitisches Familienblatt in 1935 and 1936, the threat from the Nazi authorities became so serious that he finally decided to leave Germany. In the summer of 1937, Prinz, his wife Hilde and their children Lucie and Michael emigrated to the United States.

IV. Arrival in the United States 
The Prinz family was lucky to be supported by Stephen S. Wise, President of the American Jewish Congress and one of the most important representatives of American Jewry from the 1920s to the 1940s. He invited Prinz to America, provided the necessary affidavit, supported the family financially and helped Prinz to start a new career as a lecturer for the United Palestine Appeal (UPA). Hilde’s uncle Ludwig Bendix also supported the family, although Joachim was not very fond of him. Two weeks after their arrival, the family moved to Great Neck, Long Island.

However, the initial period was a great challenge for Prinz, as it was for so many other immigrants. Sponsored by the United Jewish Appeal, he travelled as lecturer through the entire country and Canada, speaking at multiple events, explaining the Jewish situation in Germany he campaigned for Zionism and a Jewish Palestine. This made him known to American Jewry and a valuable voice for the Zionist cause. Yet the position was too poorly paid and touring the country was socially problematic as Prinz was always on the road but never at home with his family.

Thus, he frantically searched for a new job. Although he did not want to return to the rabbinical profession, particularly because he thought that it limited his political and academic ambitions too much, after two difficult years this was the only reasonable option left to him. In the summer of 1939, he received an offer to become senior rabbi of the congregation B’nai Abraham in Newark, New Jersey, which he happily accepted.

Prinz wanted to integrate into American society as quickly as possible, but soon encountered strong difficulties. In addition to cultural differences, he was particularly offended by the widespread view that America and American Jewry were substantially different from Europe and that a similar development to that in Nazi Germany was not possible there, which led to criticism of the Jewish establishment there, too, whereby Prinz accused American Zionists of the Brandeis legacy of isolating themselves from the pressing questions of Jewish history, both present and future.

While this caused skepticism about. Prinz in the eyes of the American Jewish public, he continued to enjoy great popularity in German Jewish immigrant circles, especially in New York City and New Jersey, where so many of them resided. This was much to Prinz’s chagrin, as he accused the majority of this community of not wanting to integrate and instead of clinging to a romanticised past. As such, Prinz was torn between two worlds, that of American Jews and of German Jews, while in both he felt like an outsider. It was these integration difficulties and the conditions of World War Two that delayed Prinz’ entry into Jewish politics, and it was only in the mid-1940s that he started a political career that helped to shape the course of American Jewish history for decades to come.

V. Employment and public and political activities in the United States 
Professionally, Prinz maintained his job as rabbi of Congregation B’nai Abraham for almost 40 years, until his retirement in 1977. During his tenure, he led B’nai Abraham from near bankruptcy to being one of the most respected congregations in the country. Trained as a liberal-conservative rabbi at the Breslau seminary, he kept his congregation denominationally independent while religiously moving from liberal-conservatism to the reconstructionism of Mordecai Kaplan. Neither he nor his congregation joined any rabbinical or congregational representation of the four major denominations during this time.

Even though he was a staunch enthusiast of metropolitan, inner-city life, he could not avoid the fact that B’nai Abraham also followed the pattern of post-war American Jewry of moving to the suburbs. In 1973, the congregation moved from Newark to Linvingston, New Jersey. Prinz was regarded by his community as a passionate rabbi, but he was not always entirely approachable because his priorities were with global Jewish politics.

After arriving in the US, Prinz joined the American Jewish Congress and the World Jewish Congress (WJC). In both organizations, he took leading positions from 1948. From 1958 to 1966 he was president of the American Jewish Congress, and from 1965 to 1967 president of the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations. After the cataclysmic changes of the Jewish world brought about by the Holocaust and the foundation of Israel, Prinz’ focus was the problem of Jewish survival on a global scale. After the Holocaust, it was no longer the axis of Eastern Europe and Western Europe/America that was crucial for Jewish survival, but the dualism between the American Jewish diaspora and the Jewish state of Israel. Jewish survival was only possible, as Prinz repeatedly stated, if a strong diaspora in America and a strong Israel existed, with mutual respect, and the idea that not separately but only together could they survive and thrive. He thus criticized what he saw as the indifferent attitude of American Jewry towards Israel, as well as Israeli attempts to co-opt the American diaspora, particularly by David Ben Gurion in the 1950s. Instead, he promoted regular exchange and organized the American-Israel Dialogue, which was held annually from 1962 to strengthen the connection between Israel and the diaspora.   

Even though he saw Israel as a central element of Jewish survival, he was nevertheless a harsh critic of the existing Jewish state. The preeminent role assigned to religious orthodoxy in the status quo agreement between David Ben Gurion and Agudath Israel, the failure of the Jewish state to establish a strict separation of the synagogue and the state, the devaluation of the diaspora and, above all, the treatment of the Arab/Palestinian population disturbed him. From being a supportive critic in 1948 he had turned into a permanent dissenter by the time of the Six-Day War in 1967. In this criticism, he was a close companion of Nahum Goldmann, one of the most important Jewish diaspora politicians of the twentieth century. Finally, Prinz also joined the Israel-critical organization Breira in 1973, which he left again in 1976 after its rapprochement with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).

VI. Confronting his Own History
Prinz’s background as a German Jew who experienced Nazi oppression at first hand haunted him throughout his life. While he did not speak very often about it, implicitly it was always there. After leaving Germany in 1937, he was eager to cut off all links with the country which used to be his home. But history had different ideas. It was basically his background as a former rabbi of Berlin which turned him into an emissary of Jewish concerns in post-war Germany traveling several times to Germany himself, starting in 1946 during the Nuremberg Trials. Throughout his entire political career, he closely engaged with the developments in post-war Germany. He was a staunch critic of Germany’s handling of the Nazi past, its leniency towards Nazi war criminals, and, especially in the beginning, he emphatically warned against the rise of Nazism and antisemitism in post-war Germany. His political activities centered on the failed de-Nazification policy during the immediate post-war years, the anti-Semitic wave of 1959/1960, the debate on the statute of limitations in the early 1960s, the electoral success of Nazi parties in the mid-1960s, and the establishment of diplomatic relations with Israel in 1965. It was only when Willy Brandt, a Social Democrat and former refugee himself, became German Chancellor in 1969 that Prinz no longer saw a danger of Germany falling back into Nazi barbarism.

While his confrontation with post-war Germany was an explicit confrontation with his own past as well as with the German (Jewish) legacy, other areas in which Prinz was engaged were more subtle, particularly Prinz’s involvement in Black-Jewish relations and the Civil Rights Movement. Just after arriving in America, Prinz had found his political home in the American Jewish Congress. This organization, which was founded during the First World War, drew its Zionism from an East European understanding of Jewish nationality, and had a distinctly international orientation. Both corresponded well with Prinz’s understanding of Jewish politics. However, American-Jewish relations had changed considerably since the First World War. The majority of Jews were now American-born, which meant that domestic political issues increasingly dominated, especially since only America was left of the major diasporic centers of the pre-war world.

The African American civil rights struggle eventually became one of the prime issues in post-war America. Jewish organizations were among its most passionate supporters, particularly the American Jewish Congress, in which Prinz now increasingly took on a leading role. While Prinz had repeatedly attacked racial segregation in America for years, even before he had left Germany in 1937, he was irritated by the passion with which large sections of the American Jewish Congress now subscribed to this issue. As important as this struggle was, it should not distract from the crucial problem of American Jewry, which was to ensure Jewish survival after the Holocaust and the founding of Israel. For Prinz, this was the main task that the American Jewish Congress should embrace.

This approach clashed sharply with another influential faction within the American Jewish Congress, which saw the civil rights struggle as the most important Jewish task of the time, to which everything else had to be subordinated. This faction consisted mainly of American-born Jews such as Shad Polier and Justine Wise-Polier, while many immigrants of European origin, such as Horace Kallen, gathered around Prinz. In the years that followed, this conflict continued to escalate until Prinz was initially able to win the election for president of the AJC in 1958. Despite this internal dispute, which continued to smoulder after 1958, Prinz was committed to the Civil Rights Movement as president and worked particularly closely with Martin Luther King, Jr. This cooperation culminated in the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on August 28, 1963, at which Prinz was the main Jewish speaker, just minutes before King delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech. Prinz’s speech, however, was also remarkable as he explicitly declared his own experience of Nazi German oppression as one of the main rationales for his support of the Civil Rigts Movement. When he “was the rabbi of the Jewish community in Berlin under the Hitler regime,” he told the audience of about 250.000 people, he had “learned many things. The most important thing that [he] “learned under those tragic circumstances was that bigotry and hatred are not the most urgent problem. The most urgent, the most disgraceful, the most shameful and the most tragic problem is silence.” The march, the speech, and the cheers he received afterwards probably made this the crowning moment of his life.

Prinz, Joachim. Helden und Abenteurer der Bibel. Ein Kinderbuch. Paul Baumann-Verlag, 1930.
Prinz, Joachim. Jüdische Geschichte. Berlin: Verlag für Kulturpolitik, 1931.
Prinz, Joachim. Wir Juden. Besinnung, Rückblick, Zukunft. Erich Reiss, 1934.

“Joachim Prinz.” https://www.joachimprinz.com/.
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