{"id":17,"date":"2014-08-15T22:12:00","date_gmt":"2014-08-15T22:12:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sharonroffman.com\/prinzproject\/?page_id=17"},"modified":"2014-08-17T13:02:09","modified_gmt":"2014-08-17T13:02:09","slug":"joachim-prinz-biography","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"http:\/\/sharonroffman.com\/prinzproject\/who-is-joachim-prinz\/joachim-prinz-biography\/","title":{"rendered":"Joachim Prinz Biography"},"content":{"rendered":"

Joachim Prinz\u00a0<\/strong>was born in the tiny village of Burkhardsdorf, Upper Silesia on May 10, 1902.\u00a0 His father Joseph, a man of stern demeanor who was generally incapable of intimacy, owned the General Store.\u00a0 By contrast, his mother was an exceptionally loving woman, especially close to him, but also to his two younger brothers.\u00a0 Both parents came from well-educated prosperous families who had lived in Germany for centuries.\u00a0 They were the only Jews in their town of 900.\u00a0 Around 1910, the family moved to Oppeln, a city of 35,000, which was the region\u2019s capital. It had a more substantial and relatively affluent Jewish community.\u00a0 Eventually, his father bought a large dry goods store, which provided handsomely for the family.<\/p>\n

Four years later, his beloved mother died after giving birth to his sister.\u00a0 Her death left an indelible mark.\u00a0 The distant relationship with his father, coupled with an inherently rebellious spirit, resulted in breaking the emotional bond with his family and, most particularly, with its way of life.\u00a0 Joseph Prinz, like many other German Jews, was born to a traditional Jewish family but had become highly assimilated.\u00a0 He was part of the Jewish community, but at the periphery.\u00a0 Motivated by a charismatic rabbi, Joachim Prinz\u2019 rejection of his father’s world was expressed by an increasing interest in Judaism, a bond that grew even stronger with his mother\u2019s death.\u00a0 By 1917, he had also joined the Zionist Blau Weiss (Blue White) youth movement, which put him at odds with the vast majority of German Jews.\u00a0 To his father\u2019s great disappointment, he decided to become a rabbi.<\/p>\n

By the age of 21, Joachim Prinz had earned a Ph.D. in philosophy, with a minor in Art History, at the University of Giessen.\u00a0 Two years later he was ordained at the Jewish Theological Seminary in Breslau and married Lucie Horovitz, the \u00a0daughter of one of its most renowned professors.\u00a0 Already showing special gifts and a dynamism that contrasted sharply with older, often pompous, colleagues, he was invited to become the rabbi of the then independent Friedenstempel (Peace Synagogue) in Berlin.\u00a0 Only 24, he almost immediately became what the noted scholar Rabbi W Gunther Plaut, who was a child in Berlin at the time, later described as \u201cthe county\u2019s most sought-after preacher.\u201d\u00a0 With powerful oratorical gifts and a new style of straight talk about Judaism and subjects of current interest, he was especially attractive to the young, but people of all ages flocked to his Sabbath services.\u00a0 “If you weren\u2019t on line at 7:30 for the 9 AM service,” Rabbi Plaut recalled, “you were unlikely to be admitted to an always overflowing sanctuary.”\u00a0\u00a0 But his personal life was to be challenged.\u00a0 The death of Lucie at the birth of their daughter\u00a0 (named Lucie in her memory) in January 1931was a tragic reminder of his mother\u2019s death and a devastating personal blow.\u00a0 In May of 1932, he married Hilde Goldschmidt. His new wife who, while younger, had been Lucie’s friend in the last years of her life, became a mother to his infant daughter.\u00a0 In\u00a0April of 1933 she safely gave birth to the a child of her own, Prinz’ first son, Michael.<\/p>\n

An urbane sophisticated and unconventional man, he broke down barriers of formality between pulpit and congregation by ice skating with his students and being personally accessible to their parents in what, increasingly, were becoming troubled times.\u00a0 To the great consternation of community\u2019s conservative rabbinical and lay leadership, the young, and what they considered brash, Dr. Prinz spoke out about the dangers of National Socialism long before Adolf Hitler took power in 1933.\u00a0 For the German Jewish community that that dated back to the 4th<\/sup> Century, Hitler was seen as a temporary episode, as an outsider who couldn\u2019t possibly last in their homeland.\u00a0 To Joachim Prinz, who despite his natural affinity for urban life, had grown up in rural Germany where it was prevalent, anti-Semitism was not something new.\u00a0 To him, it was an ingrained fact of life across much of the country.\u00a0 He understood that Hitler was lethal and began early on to urge that Jews leave the country. Thousands took his advice, many thousands stayed and perished in the gas chambers. Life under Hitler was a nightmare. But throughout the next four years, Prinz continued to preach his message and was the subject of numerous arrests and harassment by the Gestapo.<\/p>\n

During his eleven year rabbinate in Berlin, eventually serving the entire community and preaching in its largest synagogue, he founded numerous educational and cultural institutions, officiated at thousands of Bar Mitzvahs, weddings and funerals and wrote seven books including a two volume Children\u2019s Bible and Wir Juden<\/em>, a warning to the\u00a0 Jews about the danger they faced\u00a0 in the early 1930s.\u00a0 In his final year in Germany he served as editor-in-chief of a Jewish periodical.\u00a0 For reasons that he would never know (perhaps because he was such a popular figure) he was expelled from the country in 1937 and together with his pregnant wife and two children sailed for New York.\u00a0\u00a0 Son Jonathan was born one month after their arrival in the United States.\u00a0 A few years after the end of World War II they adopted Jo Seelmann, Hilde\u2019s cousin who had lost her parents and was herself imprisoned in Nazi concentration camps.\u00a0 Daughter Deborah was born in 1952.<\/p>\n

In the fall of 1937, with the sponsorship of Stephen S. Wise, the noted American rabbi and confidant of President Franklin Roosevelt, Joachim Prinz began his life in the United States by lecturing across the country for the United Palestine Appeal about what was happening in Germany.\u00a0 His audiences were impressed with his oratory, but many, in a still isolationist land, rejected his message.\u00a0 Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver of Cleveland, a political conservative and leader of the American Zionist Organization, was outraged by his \u201cpessimism\u201d which he considered Un-American, and complained bitterly to Wise questioning whether the refugee rabbi shouldn\u2019t find another country in which to live.\u00a0 Wise reminded his colleague that free speech was a touch stone of our democracy.\u00a0 Tragically, Prinz’ warnings proved correct.\u00a0 In fact, they were an understatement of what was to come.<\/p>\n

After two years of financial struggle and with a wife and three children to support, Joachim Prinz returned to the rabbinate accepting an invitation to become the spiritual leader of Temple B\u2019nai Abraham in Newark New Jersey, one of the country\u2019s oldest synagogues.\u00a0 He assumed its pulpit in July of 1939.\u00a0 B\u2019nai Abraham was housed in an enormous building complete with school, social center, gymnasium, swimming pool and a majestic 2,000 seat oval shaped sanctuary with a soaring hung ceiling with unobstructed views throughout.\u00a0 It was an ideal setting for a gifted preacher. His friend and mentor, Rabbi Wise spoke at the installation.<\/p>\n

Temple B\u2019nai Abraham had a magnificent home, but it was nearly bankrupt.\u00a0 Built only a few years before the Depression, many of its donors had defaulted on their pledges and only 300 families remained.\u00a0 The debts were staggering and Prinz\u2019 predecessor, forced into retirement, had long since failed to provide his congregation with any reason to be active or to attend services on a regular basis. \u00a0 Joachim Prinz changed that.\u00a0 Fortunately, the year before he arrived, the Temple had engaged Abraham Shapiro, one of the great cantors of the twentieth century, whose voice was often compared with that of Enrico Caruso.\u00a0 Composer Max Helfman was brought on as music director.\u00a0 Shapiro’s powerful tenor giving voice to Helfman\u2019s original music coupled with Prinz’ memorable sermons,\u00a0dramatically altered the tone of the Sabbath services.\u00a0 It wasn\u2019t unusual for 1000 people to attend on an ordinary Friday night.\u00a0 Prinz invigorated the educational program for both children and adults and forged strong personal relationships with congregants.\u00a0 All of this transformed the synagogue’s dynamic and, in a relatively short time, membership soared along with a restoration of financial health.\u00a0 The outstanding current debt was erased followed some years later by the burning of the mortgage.<\/p>\n

Once again Dr. Prinz was a force in a Jewish community.\u00a0 In 1945, as the war was coming to an end, he was asked to become chairman of the Essex County annual United Jewish Appeal Drive.\u00a0 Until then, they had raised no more than $200,000 in any year.\u00a0 With a clear need to help displaced Jews in Europe, the goal was for $1 Million.\u00a0 Prinz was the first and only rabbi ever to take on this task.\u00a0 He devoted enormous energy to the task and, to the astonishment of community leaders, came within a few dollars of the campaign goal.\u00a0 During the campaign, he\u00a0became intimately engaged with the larger Jewish community and from then on was never again seen as simply the rabbi of an individual congregation.<\/p>\n

In the years that followed, Joachim Prinz continued and expanded his involvement with the greater Jewish community, nationally and internationally.\u00a0 He held top leadership positions in the World Jewish Congress, first as its Vice President and ultimately Chairman of its Governing Council.\u00a0 Having reached maturity in Europe, he had a unique understanding of post-War problems there and devoted all of his summers from 1946 until his retirement years, traveling abroad.\u00a0 His first post-War trip included a moving visit to his destroyed Berlin synagogue.\u00a0 He was a director of the Conference of Jewish Material Claims against Germany.\u00a0 His early involvement in the Zionist movement had brought him into contact with the future founding leaders of the State of Israel, most of whom he counted among his good friends.\u00a0 \u00a0He also served as Chairman of the World Conference of Jewish Organizations.<\/p>\n

Perhaps closest to his heart, because he had been a victim of discrimination was the struggle for Civil Rights in the United States.\u00a0 The American Jewish Congress was at the forefront of that effort.\u00a0 He served as its President from 1958-1966.\u00a0 He participated in countless demonstrations and other actions developing close relationships with his counterparts in the African American community.\u00a0 In 1963, he was among leaders of the March on Washington.\u00a0 His speech, alerting Americans to the disgrace of silence in the face of injustice, preceded that of his friend Martin Luther King, Jr.\u00a0 It was, he always felt, a highlight of his life, the culmination of all the things\u00a0he had stood for throughout his career both in America and earlier in Germany.<\/p>\n

Prinz helped his long time friend and world Jewish leader Nahum Goldmann create the Conference of Presidents of American Jewish Organizations and served as one of its early Chairmen (1965-7).\u00a0 He wrote three more books and edited several Prayer Books.\u00a0 In his last years as its senior rabbi, he helped his synagogue build and move to a new home in Livingston New Jersey.\u00a0 At its center was a sanctuary without stained glass windows, another of his lifelong radical departures from convention.\u00a0 Worshipers look out into the natural surroundings becoming one with, rather than separated from, the outside.\u00a0 This expressed, he felt, a more open approach to religion consistent with a new time and the needs of the next generation.<\/p>\n

Having served Temple B\u2019nai Abraham for 38 years, he retired from an active role in 1977, but continued to preach on the High Holidays for several more years.\u00a0 Together with Hilde, he spent the final years of life in their little cottage in Brookside, New Jersey — in a sense returning to where he began, a small country village.\u00a0 Joachim Prinz died September 30, 1988.<\/p>\n

Reprinted from:\u00a0 http:\/\/www.joachimprinz.com\/biography.htm<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Joachim Prinz\u00a0was born in the tiny village of Burkhardsdorf, Upper Silesia on May 10, 1902.\u00a0 His father Joseph, a man of stern demeanor who was generally incapable of intimacy, owned the General Store.\u00a0 By contrast, his mother was an exceptionally loving woman, especially close to him, but also to his two younger brothers.\u00a0 Both parents… 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\/17"}],"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=17"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/sharonroffman.com\/prinzproject\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/17\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":176,"href":"http:\/\/sharonroffman.com\/prinzproject\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/17\/revisions\/176"}],"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=17"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}