Joachim Prinz was both my father and, for the decade when we shared a pulpit, my colleague.\u00a0 He was a multi-dimensional person whose private and professional life was equally as rich.\u00a0 He was a gifted orator who could move large audiences but was equally adept in intimate settings and one-on-one encounters.\u00a0 Much of his work focused on the serious whether resisting the onslaught of National Socialism in his native Germany, expounding on matters of religious concern from the pulpit or helping families overcome their grief at the loss of a loved one.\u00a0 But he also loved a joyous evening of great wine and food with good friends and family, exploring museums, listening to music and, perhaps most meaningful to me, playing the role of active and engaged parent.\u00a0 While reminding me that learning required both brains and dogged work (mostly the latter), he was never judgmental and relentlessly supportive.\u00a0 Despite five years of seminary, everything I know about being a rabbi was learned from him.\u00a0 And what he taught was to be broad, expansive and ecumenical while at the same time making every encounter personal.<\/p>\n
Those who knew him were sure they shared a special relationship, and more often than not that was exactly what they had.\u00a0 He always said, being a rabbi didn\u2019t require liking everyone, but was impossible if you didn\u2019t truly love people.\u00a0 Loving people meant caring about them, which included fighting injustice.\u00a0 He saw all injustice as one, an interconnected evil.\u00a0 That\u2019s why he so immediately related his own experience as a Jew in Nazi Germany with the plight of African Americans.\u00a0 He deeply loved his adopted country, his home, but he always demanded that it live up to its core ideals.\u00a0 The same held true for his love for Israel rooted in his own having joined a Zionist youth movement in 1917 and numbering among his friends the State\u2019s founding leaders.\u00a0 But he reserved the right to be critical when he felt it strayed from its own ideals.\u00a0 He was an early proponent of making peace with the Palestinians whose human needs and rights he saw as no different than his own.<\/p>\n
A year after finishing my undergraduate studies, we spent an entire summer in Europe, just the two of us.\u00a0 After a wonderful month on the island of Ibiza, we drove from the south of France to Paris, stopping off for spectacular food and seeing the sights, especially the majestic Cathedral of Chartres, one of his favorite places and mine.\u00a0 From there it was on to Switzerland where he had several days of World Jewish Congress meetings.\u00a0 It was the summer when the infamous wall was going up and he was asked to preach in Berlin on the following Friday night.\u00a0 We went, just for twenty-four hours.\u00a0 The community where he had served and spoken regularly before thousands was a shadow of itself, shaken by the uncertainty brought on by the wall.\u00a0 The visit interrupted his and our personal time, his summer break from a very busy and demanding life.\u00a0 There was no question that we would go, not a moment of hesitation.\u00a0 People needed him, and he was there for them.\u00a0 It didn\u2019t surprise me because he was always there for me, for our family and for countless of others many of whom we would never know.\u00a0 He was just being Joachim Prinz.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
By Jonathan Prinz (2014) Joachim Prinz was both my father and, for the decade when we shared a pulpit, my colleague.\u00a0 He was a multi-dimensional person whose private and professional life was equally as rich.\u00a0 He was a gifted orator who could move large audiences but was equally adept in intimate settings and one-on-one encounters.\u00a0… Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"parent":9,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/sharonroffman.com\/prinzproject\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/15"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/sharonroffman.com\/prinzproject\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/sharonroffman.com\/prinzproject\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sharonroffman.com\/prinzproject\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sharonroffman.com\/prinzproject\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/sharonroffman.com\/prinzproject\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/15\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":175,"href":"http:\/\/sharonroffman.com\/prinzproject\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/15\/revisions\/175"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sharonroffman.com\/prinzproject\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/9"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/sharonroffman.com\/prinzproject\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}