Childhood and Youth in Silesia

Joachim Prinz was born on 10 May 1902 as the first of four children into a rather typical middle-class German-Jewish family in Bierdzan (Bierdzany) in Upper Silesia: petit bourgeois, German nationalist, and secular in orientation. Like many members of his generation, Prinz rebelled against this background, first by turning to socialism and more passionately Zionism, and in 1921 even commencing rabbinical training at the Jüdisch-Theologische Seminar (Jewish-Theological Seminary) in Breslau (Wrocław). Immediately thereafter, he moved to Berlin, where he became the city’s youngest rabbi in early 1927, serving the Friedenstempel community.

As a Rabbi in Berlin

Prinz took Berlin by storm. Within a brief period, he became one of the most beloved rabbis in the city because he always had a sympathetic ear for the young and used his sermons in the synagogue to address the present day, and not only scripture. Prinz and his first wife, Lucie Prinz, née Horovitz (1902–1931), also enjoyed the cultural and sexual freedom reigning in the capital, as did his second wife, Hilde Prinz, née Goldschmidt (1913–1994), whom he married after the death of his first wife. Prinz was not only admired as a down-to-earth rabbi, but also as the eloquent author of a children’s book entitled Helden und Abenteurer der Bibel (Heroes and Adventures of the Bible, 1930) and a work of popular scholarship entitled Jüdische Geschichte (Jewish History, 1931) that was highly praised by critics. However, from the day he took office in Berlin, Prinz also went on the offensive against the liberal Jewish establishment, especially the heads of the Berlin community. As a Zionist rabbi, he argued passionately in favor of a so-called Jewish Renaissance, meaning a cultural, religious, and national revival of Judaism in the diaspora.

Following the beginning of Nazi rule in January 1933, Prinz ascended to become one of the most important but also one of the most provocative characters within the Jewish community, whose popularity would soon radiate beyond Berlin and the borders of Germany. His work Wir Juden (We Jews), published in late 1933, was probably the most widely discussed Jewish book of the Nazi period. Therein, he powerfully and eloquently argued – as he did on many occasions otherwise – in favor of Jewish nationalism, of building up Palestine as a ‘solution to the Jewish question,’ and railing against liberal Judaism, which he accused of ideological and political failure in the face of the Nazi threat. With this program, Prinz, along with the editor of the weekly Jüdische Rundschau, Robert Weltsch (1891–1982), became one of the most important pillars of support for the increasingly beleaguered Jewish population. Prinz also gave courage to the members of his community, and his sermons at the Friedenstempel Synagogue in Berlin-Halensee consequently became popular mass events.

Fig. 2: Herbert Sonnenfeld and Joachim Prinz (right) on the Grunewald sports field during the Hakoah Jubilee Sports Festival, Berlin, June 1934; Jewish Museum Berlin, inv. no. FOT 88/500/334/050, acquired through funding from the Stiftung Deutsche Klassenlotterie Berlin.

However, his popularity eventually came at a price. First, the Berlin Jewish Community dismissed him as a community rabbi in 1935 – a remarkable step given the ongoing Nazi threat. Having subsequently established himself as the editor of the weekly Israelitisches Familienblatt, the pressure exerted by the Nazis eventually became so great that he saw no other option but to leave Germany. In the summer of 1937, Joachim and Hilde Prinz emigrated to the United States together with their children Lucie (born 1931; known in the United States as Lucy) and Michael (1933–1998).

A Rocky New Beginning: Joachim Prinz in the United States

Rabbi Stephen S. Wise (1874–1949), president of the American Jewish Congress (AJCongress) and one of the most important representatives of American Jewry from the 1920s through the 1940s, had invited the family to the United States. Wise signed an affidavit, a declaration of sponsorship that was required to immigrate to the United States, and supported the family from the very beginning. Nevertheless, the early days presented a great challenge for Prinz, like for many other immigrants. In preparation for his emigration, he had already been intensively learning English in Germany. He therefore had fewer difficulties than those whose arrival was additionally encumbered by linguistic barriers. Although Prinz thus had the best starting position possible, it would take two years altogether until he was finally appointed as a rabbi of the community B’nai Abraham in Newark, New Jersey. He had thus taken a first step, even though he had actually wanted to leave the rabbinical profession behind.

He was faced not only with financial difficulties, but also found it difficult to integrate culturally and politically, despite his intention of doing so as quickly as possible. This was not only out of social and material necessity, but also because he revered America as an idea. He was particularly impressed by the national and cultural diversity of American society, which – so he believed – was fundamentally different from the ethnic homogeneity demanded by the Germans. Yet Prinz soon began to sense strong differences of a cultural and political nature. He was particularly irked by the widespread notion that the conditions in the United States were categorically different from those in Europe, and that a development comparable to that in Nazi Germany would therefore be impossible in the former. He was especially critical of American Zionism, which, since the days of its luminary Louis D. Brandeis, had emphasized the connection of Jewish identity with American ideals like democracy and social justice, while framing support for a Jewish nation-state as a political, but not a necessarily religious affair. Prinz consequently accused the movement of isolating itself from pressing questions concerning the Jewish past, present, and future.

While the Jewish public in the United States was initially skeptical about Prinz, given this criticism, he remained immensely popular among German-Jewish immigrant circles, especially in neighboring New York. Many people had settled there who already knew Prinz from Berlin and continued to revere him as a great German rabbi. Yet his relationship to these circles was ambivalent. On the one hand, he mobilized his reputation within this community to lobby as their representative in American society and politics, to support Jewish refugees, and to fight fascism in Europe, especially National Socialism. On the other hand, Prinz spoke disparagingly in private about German Jewry both within Nazi Germany and in exile. He accused the majority of this community of not wanting to integrate, preferring instead to hold on to a romanticized past.

Prinz was thus torn between two worlds – the American-Jewish and the German-Jewish – and felt like an outsider in both, even though he and his family had already received US citizenship in 1938. These difficulties in integrating and the circumstances of the Second World War meant that Prinz only became more politically active from the mid-1940s onward, when he began to help shape the course of American-Jewish history.

Fig. 3: Joachim Prinz in front of his destroyed “Friedenstempel” Synagogue, 1949. Joachim Prinz photographs, PC-3551, Jacob Rader Marcus Center of the American Jewish Archives.

The Civil Rights Movement

Prinz quickly found a political home in the AJCongress. Established in December 1918, this organization pursued a form of Zionism based on an Eastern European understanding of Jewish nationality and had a decidedly international orientation. Both of these characteristics spoke to Prinz’s conceptions of Jewish politics. However, the conditions for American Jewry had changed dramatically since the First World War. By this point, the majority of American Jews had been born in the United States, meaning that their discourse was increasingly dominated by domestic political concerns – especially since only the United States remained from among the most important diasporic centers of the prewar era.

The African American struggle for civil rights eventually developed into one of the key issues in American politics and society in the postwar era. Jewish organizations numbered among their most passionate supporters, above all the AJCongress, in which Prinz was increasingly playing a leading role. For years – even before he left Germany in 1937 – he had repeatedly spoken out against racist segregation in the United States, yet he was nevertheless irritated by the passion with which large parts of his own organization now pounced upon this issue. Prinz argued that no matter how important this struggle was, it should not distract from the decisive problem facing American Jewry: securing Jewish survival after the Shoah and the foundation of an Israeli state. Prinz thought this should be the AJCongress’s primary focus.

This position sparked a heated conflict with an influential faction within the organization, which regarded the civil rights movement as the most important Jewish mission of the time, to which everything else should be subordinated. This faction comprised primarily members born in the United States, like the lawyers Shad Polier (1906–1976) and Justine Wise Polier (1903–1987), while Prinz was supported by numerous immigrants of European origin, like the cultural philosopher and pioneer of pluralism, Horace Kallen (1882–1974) from Lower Silesia. While individual backgrounds were not in themselves decisive in determining which side was chosen in the conflict, the civil rights movement remained a deeply American issue, whereas global Jewish questions were not of special importance to most Jews in the United States before the Six-Day War in 1967. By contrast, Prinz’s experience as a German Jew who had survived National Socialism shaped his special focus on questions of Jewish survival. This perspective differed from that held by many of the activists who had been born in the United States and exemplified various forms of Jewish memory and Jewish conceptions of the future.

Fig. 4: Joachim Prinz with Martin Luther King Jr. and Shad Polier at a fundraising event of the American Jewish Congress, 1963; photo reproduced with kind permission of the American Jewish Historical Society, New York. From the collections of the American Jewish Congress (I-77).

This conflict deepened increasingly in the following years, until Prinz was elected president of the AJCongress in 1958 and was thus able to resolve it in his favor for the time being. Despite this internal conflict, which would continue thereafter, Prinz dedicated himself to the civil rights movement in his role as president and thus worked especially closely with Martin Luther King. The high point of this cooperation was finally the March on Washington on 28 August 1963 – an event that presumably also constituted a high point in Prinz’s own life.

International Politics: The Federal Republic of Germany and Israel

From the very beginning of his career in the AJCongress in the early 1940s, global Jewish politics formed the main focus of Prinz’s activities. He kept especially close tabs on developments in postwar Germany, criticizing what he saw as the insufficient engagement with Nazi crimes and warning emphatically about the revival of National Socialism and antisemitism. Prinz traveled to West Germany repeatedly – for example, in 1946 to attend the Nuremberg trials – and later to protest against neo-Nazi and antisemitic events and developments. At the same time, he used these trips to personally meet with important representatives of German politics, including Federal Presidents Theodor Heuss (1884–1963) and Heinrich Lübke (1894–1972) and Federal Chancellors Konrad Adenauer (1876-1967), Ludwig Erhard (1897–1977), and Willy Brandt (1913–1992). The central focus of his political activities in the Federal Republic lay, among other things, on the antisemitic wave of the years 1959/60, the debate about the statute of limitations, and the electoral successes of right-wing extremist parties in the mid-1960s, as well as the establishment of diplomatic relations with Israel in 1965. Prinz’s assessment of the political situation in the Federal Republic and the possible revival of Nazism fluctuated over time, and only with the election of Willy Brandt as chancellor in 1969 did he consider the danger of Germany ‘regressing into barbarism’ to be perpetually banished. Despite his largely pragmatic politics with regard to the Federal Republic, Prinz internally abhorred just about everything associated with Germany: its political culture, its population, and even its Jewish community. Like many of its former citizens, he only revered Berlin and, until the end of his life, looked back with a certain nostalgia on the city’s lost splendor.

Fig. 5: Joachim Prinz speaking at an event of the Berlin Jewish Community, Berlin, around 1964; Jewish Museum Berlin, inv. no. 2003/121/65, donated by Hannelore Mintscheff.

Thus, Prinz was not able to let Germany go, even though his main interest had long shifted to another topic: Jewish survival on a global scale. In his view, the axis of Eastern Europe-Western Europe-United States was no longer decisive for this survival after the Shoah, but rather the dualism between the American-Jewish diaspora and the Jewish State of Israel. As he proclaimed repeatedly from early 1948 onward, Jewish survival would only be possible if there were a strong American diaspora and a strong Israel – two poles that respected one another and saw themselves as collectively forming a unit. Prinz therefore criticized what he saw as the indifference with which American Jewry regarded Israel, just as he criticized the Israeli attempts to speak on behalf of the Jewish diaspora in the United States, especially by Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion (1886–1973) in the 1950s. Prinz instead supported regular contact, and he therefore organized the annual American-Israel Dialogue from 1962 onward in order to strengthen the connection between Israel and the Jewish diaspora.

Even though Prinz regarded Israel as the key guarantee of Jewish survival, he nevertheless remained a vocal critic of the Jewish state. He was disturbed by the power wielded by the orthodox, the denigration of the Jewish diaspora, and especially the treatment of the Arab/Palestinian population. His criticisms in the early phase of the country’s history, which were made out of solidarity, had by the Six-Day War at the latest turned into perpetual opposition. In this respect, Prinz concurred especially with the Zionist Nahum Goldmann (1895–1982), one of the twentieth century’s most significant Jewish politicians of the diaspora. Initially a leading member of the World Jewish Congress (WJC) from the mid-1960s to the 1970s, Prinz joined the American-Jewish organization Breira in 1973, which took a critical stance toward Israel, but left again in 1976 after it established ties with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).

A Rabbi and Author 

Notably, Prinz was not only politically active but also authored several books, such as The Dilemma of the Modern Jew (1962), Popes from the Ghetto (1966), and The Secret Jews (1973). Above all, he was a successful rabbi, who, during his time in office (1939–1977), saved the community B’nai Abraham from bankruptcy and transformed it into one of the most respected communities in the country.

Although Prinz was a convinced urbanite, he could not prevent B’nai Abraham from following the trend toward suburbanization that gripped American Jewry in the postwar period. In 1973, the community moved from the center of Newark to the suburb of Livingston, New Jersey. His community viewed Prinz as a passionate rabbi, but not always as the most approachable person, given the fact that he dedicated himself more to global Jewish politics than anything else. Prinz retired in 1977, withdrew from public life in the early 1980s, and died of a heart attack in Livingston in 1988.

Selected Bibliography

Further Resources

Official website: www.joachimprinz.com. The website offers documents, photos, and videos on the life and work of Joachim Prinz and was designed by his son Jonathan J. Prinz.

Speech by Joachim Prinz at the March on Washington, Washington, D.C., 28 August 1963:

Allan Nadler, The Plot for America, in: Tablet. A New Read on Jewish Life (Online), www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/the-plot-for-america

Rachel Nierenberg Pasternak/Rachel Eskin Fisher/Clement Price, Rabbi Joachim Prinz: The Jewish Leader Who Bridged Two Journeys, From Slavery to Freedom, in: Moment Magazine, 6 November 2014. https://momentmag.com/rabbi-joachim-prinz-jewish-leader-bridged-two-journeys-slavery-freedom/

Rachel Eskin Fisher/Rachel Nierenberg Pasternak (dir.), Joachim Prinz: I Shall Not Be Silent [Documentary film], Menemsha Films, 2014, accessed 21 April 2026, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2wNcdiBUDK0.