Joachim Prinz looms large in Essex County. The famed orator, civil rights activist, and national Jewish leader served as rabbi of Temple B'nai Abraham from 1939, when it was still in Newark, until his retirement in 1977.

Prinz famously spoke at the 1963 March on Washington. He served as president of the American Jewish Congress and chaired the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations and the World Jewish Congress Governing Council.

Rabbi Clifford Kulwin, the current religious leader at B'nai Abraham, now in Livingston, acknowledged that while he does not lead in Prinz's shadow, Prinz is "always present."

Surprisingly, despite his prominence as a rabbi and leader in Germany and the United States, no scholarly articles and no biographies have been written about him.

Until they are, the deepest portrait of Prinz may be found in Joachim Prinz, Rebellious Rabbi, an autobiography edited by Michael A. Meyer. Published in November by Indiana University Press, the text covers Prinz's early years, from his birth in Burkhardsdorf, a small town in Upper Silesia, until the death of his mentor, Stephen A. Wise, in 1949.

Meyer, the Adolph S. Ochs Professor of Jewish History at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion and international president of the Leo Baeck Institute, wrote the introduction to the book. He also includes brief footnotes throughout the text, correcting minor inaccuracies and pointing out major discrepancies.

For Meyer, the text is extraordinary not only for its revelations regarding Prinz's public life in Nazi Germany but for its openness with regard to his private life, including his freewheeling university and seminary years and participation in the "sexual revolution" of the Weimar years.

"I think [about] the extraordinary audacity he possessed as a rabbi in Nazi Germany," said Meyer, "and the guts he had vis-a- vis the Nazis — the degree to which he was able to deal with the Nazis and the courage he displayed getting his message of comfort and of action out to people."

Meyer said what also impressed him was Prinz's unusual "openness regarding his private and sexual life…. It's more common today but it does not fit the image of a European rabbi. I think the freedom and libertinism of his private life is surprising."

Prinz was "a colorful character," as Meyer put it, and the autobiography captures his many sides, including his interactions with Jewish mobsters in New Jersey.

"He liked to rebel against all kinds of conventions and traditions. He liked to say what was shocking and different," said Meyer.

Readers follow Prinz (1902-1988) from his well-to-do childhood in a small town with little Jewish tradition to his rise to prominence as a 23-year-old Liberal rabbi in Germany and again in America.

He details the traumatic death of his mother during childbirth just shy of his 13th birthday, his relationship with his parents, and his decision to attend rabbinical school. Prinz offers a window into the high life that marked Berlin in the late 1920s and early '30s and his marriages to Lucie Horovitz and, following her death after the birth of their first child, to Hilde Goldschmidt.

And he reflects on how, early on, he saw signs of darker times to come, warned people about it from the pulpit, but found himself preaching to deaf ears.

One incident he refers to occurred in 1929, in the town of Kassel, Germany. "The Jews came in large numbers to listen to me, and when I told them that Hitler had to be taken seriously and that Jews had better prepare for that day, there was a storm of protest in the audience. One man, pointing at me, rose and said: ‘And this man claims to be a rabbi!' I left the assembly in turmoil knowing that I had spoken the truth, but the Jews did not want to hear it."

Prinz also had a way of embellishing the truth — a danger in any autobiography, Meyer points out in his introduction.

"It's hard to say if it's just memory — that after a story is told and retold, it becomes more fabulous, or certain details fall out," Meyer told NJJN. At one point, Prinz relates that the Gestapo accused him of having caused the destruction of the Hindenburg "on the day of my arrival in America." Meyer said Prinz's passport showed he arrived in the United States on March 16, 1937, and was back in Southampton, England, on April 26 — a month before the zeppelin exploded in flames in Lakehurst, NJ.

But such "self-dramatizations" can't take away from Prinz's achievements in the pulpit and beyond. The autobiography reveals his fervent Zionism, his activism in the larger Newark community, his prodigious fund-raising for local and global Jewish needs, and, always, his monumental skills as an orator.

"Among German Zionists, Prinz was the movement's most popular propagandist," writes Meyer. "Among rabbis, his part in the spiritual resistance to Nazism was second only to that of the leader of German Jewry during the Nazi period, Rabbi Leo Baeck.

"Finally, in the United States, Prinz became one of the foremost Jewish leaders of the Civil Rights movement."

Meyer acknowledged that he was skeptical about the text, dictated to his secretary around 1977, when he first received it from Kulwin, a former student at HUC.

"There are so many memoirs people write, particularly those with any relationship to the Holocaust. They are valuable for historical purposes, but very few are of such general interest to be worthy of publication. I thought I would read through it and then put it into archives. But I found it so interesting, and I thought a lot of people would be interested as well."