Joachim Prinz: The Rebellious Rabbi, Civil Rights Activist & white Abolitionist #BlackHandSide
Joachim Prinz was born on May 10th, 1902.
He was a white Jewish-American Rabbi outspoken against Nazism and an activist for the?American Civil Rights movement.
Prinz was born to a Jewish family in the village of Bierdzany (near Oppeln) in the Prussian province of Silesia.?
Early on, he became motivated and took an increasing interest in Judaism.
His Jewish roots grew even stronger following his mother’s death.
By 1917, he had also joined Blau Weiss, the Zionist youth movement.
At 21, Prinz received his Ph.D. in philosophy and minored in Art History, at the University of Giessen.
He was ordained as a rabbi at the Jewish Theological Seminary in Breslau.
He married Lucie Horovitz who died in Berlin shortly after giving birth to their daughter Lucie. Prinz then married Hilde Goldschmidt in 1932.
They had three children, Michael (born in Berlin), Jonathan and Deborah (both born in the United States) Prinz was already familiar with anti-Semitism in society.
He could see Hitler’s message as a rallying cry that was capturing the hearts of the country.
He started persuading Jews to leave Germany, to save their lives. This message made him a constant Gestapo target. He was often arrested and detained on harassment charges by the Gestapo.
As his prominence grew in Germany and his fears of Hitler's reign coming to fruition, he earned the sponsorship of Rabbi Stephen Wise who was a close adviser to President Franklin Roosevelt.
On November 24, 1942, after being informed by U.S. Undersecretary of State?Sumner Welles, Wise held a press conference in Washington, D.C., and announced that the Nazis had a plan for the extermination of all European Jews, and had already killed 2 million; it didn't make front-page news.?The information was based on the?Riegner Telegram, a message sent to Wise in August 1942 by?Gerhart M Riegner, then representative of the?World Jewish Congress?in Geneva, informing the Allies about the plans of the so-called "Final Solution?of the?Jewish question" for the first time. Together with Nahum Goldmann, Wise spread the information about the ongoing genocide to Sweden and other countries by telegram.
There are, in the body politic, economic and social, many and grave evils, and there is urgent necessity for the sternest war upon them. There should be relentless exposure of and attack upon every evil man whether politician or business man, every evil practice, whether in politics, in business, or in social life. I hail as a benefactor every writer or speaker, every man who, on the platform, or in book, magazine, or newspaper, with merciless severity makes such attack, provided always that he in his turn remembers that the attack is of use only if it is absolutely truthful.
— Theodore Roosevelt
In 1937, Prinz immigrated to the United States.
He settled in New Jersey as the spiritual leader of Temple B'Nai Abraham in Newark.
Agosto 1963. Mathew Ahmann, Rabbi Joachim Prinz, John Lewis, the Rev. Eugene Carson Blake, Whitney Young, A. Philip Randolph, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., and Roy Wilkins.
He immediately began lecturing throughout the U.S. for the United Palestine Appeal, established in the 1920s as the fundraising arm in the United States for the Jewish Agency for Israel.
It was, essentially, the precursor to what became the American Jewish support base for a nation-state of Israel and the United Israel Appeal.
From his early days in Newark, a city with a very large minority community, he spoke from his pulpit about the disgrace of discrimination. He joined the picket lines across America protesting racial prejudice from unequal employment to segregated schools, housing and all other areas of life.
While serving as President of the American Jewish Congress, he represented the Jewish community as an organizer of August 28, 1963, March on Washington.?
He came to the podium immediately following a stirring spiritual sung by?Mahalia Jackson?
A black and white photograph of Rabbi Dr. Joachim Prinz giving a speech at the March on Washington, August 1963, directly prior to the speech offered by Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. PC-3551. American Jewish Archives, Cincinnati, Ohio.
and just before Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his famous "I Have a Dream" speech.
Dr. Prinz's address is remembered for its contention that, based on his experience as a Rabbi in Nazi Germany after the rise of Hitler, in the face of discrimination, "the most urgent, the most disgraceful, the most shameful and the most tragic problem is silence."
Dr. Prinz devoted much of his life in the United States to the Civil Rights movement.
Joachim Prinz died on September 30, 1988.
Continued Legacy:
On 28 August 1963, Prinz spoke at the famous March on Washington, presenting a speech that related Jewish suffering to the U.S. civil rights movement. He accentuated:
As Jews, we bring to this great demonstration, in which thousands of us proudly participate, a two-fold experience — one of the spirit and one of our history.
In the realm of the spirit, our fathers taught us thousands of years ago that when God created man, he created him as everybody’s neighbor. Neighbor is not a geographic term. It is a moral concept. It means our collective responsibility for the preservation of man’s dignity and integrity.
From our Jewish historic experience of three and a half thousand years we say:
Our ancient history began with slavery and the yearning for freedom. During the Middle Ages, my people lived for a thousand years in the ghettos of Europe.
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Our modern history begins with a proclamation?of emancipation.
It is for these reasons that it is not merely sympathy and compassion for the black people of America that motivates us. It is above all and beyond all such sympathies and emotions a sense of complete identification and solidarity born of our own painful historic experience.
Furthermore, in reflection on his time in Nazi Germany, Prinz informed: “the most important thing that I 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.”
Bonus Research:
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