Dolf’s son grew up with the knowledge of his father’s escape. He made camps, Israel journeys and Jewish youth leadership his life’s work.
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In memory of Paul. Forty-four years of Reform Jewish youth work carried forward a family that had to leave Halberstadt.FamilyDolfGolden Book
Paul was the son of Adolf “Dolf” Reichenbach and Susan “Subie” Ulmer Reichenbach. In the house he grew up in, Dolf’s escape from Nazi Germany was not distant history; it was the reason the family existed at all. Paul carried that knowledge into a working life among Jewish teenagers, and passed it in turn to his own children — Sara Reichenbach Manor, Joanna “Joey” Reichenbach Amichai and Rabbi Daniel Dolph Reichenbach.
Born in Boston and raised in Newton, Massachusetts, Paul went to Kutz Camp in Warwick, New York, in the summer of 1969, when he was seventeen. The national teen leadership camp of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, as the Reform movement was then called, became a place he returned to again and again. There he met Judith Newman, who would become his wife, and friends he would keep for more than fifty years. In 1970 he moved to New York City to attend New York University and shared an apartment with his Kutz friend Loui Dobin. He loved the camp so completely that, in the deepest sense, he never left. In 1975 he joined the movement’s professional youth staff. From that point forward his work was the distance between one good summer and a whole Jewish life.