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Charlotte Knobloch (2L) with German President Horst Koehler (C) at a recent ceremony in memory of Paul Spiegel, the former leader of Germany's Jewish community who died in late April at the age of 68 after a long illness.
Photo: German Press Office
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BERLIN (AFP)--- Germany’s growing Jewish community on Wednesday elected its first female leader, Charlotte Knobloch, a Holocaust survivor and outspoken critic of the extreme right.
She pledged to heal divisions between native Germans and newcomers from the former Soviet bloc.
The executive board of the Central Council of Jews in Germany said the 73-year-old Knobloch, who has led the Jewish community in the southern city of Munich since 1985, had won its vote unanimously.
Knobloch succeeds Paul Spiegel, a well-liked and respected figure who died in late April at the age of 68 after a long illness.
The Council is the highest political and religious body representing Germany’s estimated 110,000 – 200,000 Jews, most of whom are immigrants from the former Soviet bloc who arrived after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.
Focus on integration
Knobloch described their integration as "one of the most important tasks" facing her due to the cultural and language barriers between the old and new members of the community.
She told reporters that Jews here now saw themselves as full-fledged members of German society "even if we are still far from a normal situation".
Before WWII and the Holocaust, there were some 600,000 German Jews.
Chancellor Angela Merkel hailed Knobloch’s "active and tireless engagement" for the Jewish community in Europe and said the close cooperation between the government and the Council would continue.
Knobloch was born in October 1932 in Munich, the daughter of prominent lawyer and state senator Fritz Neuland, just three months before Hitler came to power.
After her parents’ divorce, she lived with her grandmother who later died at Auschwitz.
As the Nazis’ genocidal campaign began, she went into hiding at a farm in northern Bavaria, where a young Catholic woman saved her life by presenting her as her illegitimate daughter.
Her father was imprisoned as a slave laborer and they were only reunited after the war when she found him in a Munich hospital.
Neuland became one of the founding members of Munich’s vestigial Jewish community in July 1945, just two months after the war’s end. He later became its president.
Charlotte married Samuel Knobloch, a survivor of Krakow’s Jewish ghetto in 1951. They planned to leave for the United States and escape the bitter memories of the war but her first pregnancy anchored them in Germany.
Munich Jewish community
Decades later, after her three children finished school, Knobloch became active in Munich’s Jewish community, attacking a surge in far-right violence after national reunification in 1990 and what she called "the new anti-Semitism".
She has championed the construction of a complex to serve Munich’s 9,300 Jews, including a synagogue, community center and museum.
The development is to open on November 9 this year, on the 68th anniversary of the Night of Broken Glass when Nazi thugs rampaged through German cities, vandalizing Jewish businesses and torching synagogues.
Knobloch has served as vice president of the Council since 1997. She has served the same function in the World Jewish Congress since 2005.
"In the heart of Munich, a vision is becoming reality," Knobloch has said of the new center.
"With this project, Jewry will again be as visible in Munich as it was before the Nazi period."
A widow, Knobloch has seven grandchildren.
Spiegel had won widespread praise for his leadership of the third largest Jewish community in western Europe, a community which is still growing more than 60 years after the Nazis tried to destroy it.
He signed an agreement in January 2003 with then chancellor Gerhard Schroeder which gave the Council equal legal status with Germany’s main churches and annual support of three million euros.