When Rabbi Joachim Prinz issued a Thanksgiving message on November 15, 1963 (text below), he was 7 years into his tenure (1958-1966) as president of the American Jewish Congress, one of the most renowned American Jewish advocacy and civil rights organizations. The AJ Congress archives showcase the scope of its national and global social, political, and economic advocacy since its founding in 1918, from spearheading anti-Nazi rallies to pursuing legal challenges to discriminatory practices in employment, education and housing, including submitting briefs in almost every racial segregation case which arrived before the Supreme Court, such as the Brown v. Board of Education school desegregation decisions of 1954 and 1955.
At the publication date of this Thanksgiving message, less than three months had passed since Rabbi Prinz had delivered an address titled “The Issue is Silence”—with the opening line “I speak to you as an American Jew”— at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on August 28. He was followed by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech.
The text of Rabbi Prinz’s Thanksgiving message reflects both his long-established dedication to racial equality, rooted in his firsthand experiences of persecution, arrest, and finally expulsion from Germany in 1937, and AJ Congress’s institutional commitment to civil rights, including partnerships with the NAACP and the ACLU.
Listen to Rabbi Prinz being interviewed by Mike Wallace in 1960 and learn more about AJ Congress’s extensive civil rights advocacy from its historic archives.
Thanksgiving Message, November 15, 1963
By Rabbi Joachim Prinz, President of the American Jewish Congress
Thanksgiving 1963 comes at a moment when an ecumenical spirit embraces clergymen of all faiths, when churches and synagogues alike recognize their obligation to join in the great moral struggle for racial justice.
As Jews, we have a special experience with segregation. We, too, were slaves, under Pharoah in Egypt. We, too, lived in the ghettoes of a continent. We, too, learned that mere proclamations of emancipation offered no guarantee of genuine freedom.
Because we knew slavery, because our Bible tells us that all men are brothers, we Jews must act — where we live, where we work, where we send our children to school — to demand an end to segregation and the beginning of a decent chance in life for our Negro fellow-Americans. To our elected representatives in Washington we must voice our support of a broad and comprehensive civil rights bill. To our friends and neighbors at home, we must express our solemn resolve that no man should be judged according to his skin, or the house in which he worships, or the land from which his ancestors came to these shores.
In this Thanksgiving season, as we express our gratitude to the Creator for the blessings of liberty and the bountiful harvests we enjoy, let us commit ourselves to the cause of millions of our fellow-citizens who still await these blessings. Let us help translate the promise of social justice to into the reality of equal opportunity in housing, in education, in employment.
Let us give thanks by giving of ourselves to the cause of full equality in a free society for all Americans, to the end that every citizen may know the joy of freedom on Thanksgiving Day.
