Jewish Leader Eulogized in Berlin : Religion: Heinz Galinski, who died Sunday, was the most important individual in re-establishing Judaism in the land of the Holocaust.

As a national television audience looked on, German leaders Friday paid their final respects to Heinz Galinski, the controversial leader of the country’s tiny Jewish community.

As the single most important individual in re-establishing Judaism in the land that unleashed the Holocaust, Galinski was a pivotal figure of post-World World War II German democracy.

A survivor of Nazi concentration camps, including Auschwitz, Buchenwald and Bergen-Belsen, he died last Sunday in a Berlin hospital after failing to recover from a heart operation a month before. He was 79.

Galinski was a sharp-spoken, uncompromising man who assembled many enemies both inside and outside Jewish circles with his irascible style and relentless crusade to keep the Holocaust’s memory alive, to prosecute leading ex-Nazis and push his community’s interests.

More recently he spoke out strongly against attacks on foreigners and asylum-seekers that have accompanied the heavy influx of immigrants into Germany since the collapse of the Iron Curtain three years ago.

A long profile published in the respected Hamburg weekly Die Zeit several years ago carried the headline, “The Difficult One.”

But Galinski never flinched from criticism, frequently responding to opponents with a comment that characterized much of his adult life: “My nature is not to nag and warn, but I did not survive Auschwitz to be quiet in the face of injustice.”

This personal determination was a key asset in rekindling the flame of Judaism in Berlin, the city where Nazis once plotted its extermination.

From an estimated total of about 2,000 Jews who survived underground or in mixed marriages in Germany in 1945 and the 1,000 others who returned from concentration camps elsewhere in Europe, Galinski helped build an active, lively Jewish community that today numbers about 35,000.

There were about 600,000 Jews in Germany when Hitler rose to power in January, 1933.

Galinski urged integration but not assimilation with Germany’s predominant Christian community, and his contacts with the country’s leading politicians served both as a shield against possible discrimination and a guarantee that the community’s voice would not go unheard.

The level of those contacts was visible among the mourners at his funeral, who included German President Richard von Weizsaecker, Chancellor Helmut Kohl and the president of the German parliament, Rita Suessmuth.

“In him, all Germany has lost an untiring, committed democrat and a genuine patriot,” Kohl told the crowd that filled the main Jewish Community Center in central western Berlin and spilled out into the adjacent courtyard.

“His death is a painful loss for us all,” he said.

Kohl described the decision of Galinski and other death camp survivors to return to Germany in 1945 despite their horrific suffering at the hands of the Nazis as “a precious gift” that helped build the new German democracy.

Born in the west Prussian town of Marienburg in November, 1912, Galinski moved to Berlin in 1933 because he believed he would be safer from anti-Semitism there.

In November, 1938, he watched German mobs burn the synagogue that stood at the same central Berlin location as the community center where his funeral service was held Friday.

He was arrested and shipped to Auschwitz in 1943 along with his wife and mother. He was separated from them during the arrival selection process and never saw them again.

Freed by British forces from Bergen-Belsen in April, 1945, he immediately returned to Berlin because, he said, he wanted to help build a democratic society in Germany.

His contacts with political leaders were instrumental in reviving Berlin’s Jewish life.

He established the country’s biggest Jewish library in Berlin and launched schools from kindergarten to secondary level, opening them to non-Jews as well as Jews.

To the anger of Israeli authorities, he managed in the 1980s to win German government approval to accept in Berlin some of the Israel-bound Jews permitted to emigrate from the Soviet Union.

It was a move that breathed new life into the community, raising its number from about 6,000 to 9,000.

While he nurtured his community, he brooked no competition.

When a small group tried to revive an old Jewish community in east Berlin following unification, Galinski managed to use his political influence to block official recognition and then refused to have anything to do with them.

Who will succeed Galinski as the prime spokesman of Germany’s Jewish community is unclear, but it is likely that the voice will be softer.