Paul Spiegel, 68; Top Leader of Germany’s Central Council of Jews

Paul Spiegel, who fled the Nazis as a child during World War II and later became the head of Germany’s main Jewish organization, has died. He was 68.

Spiegel died Sunday of cancer in a hospital in Duesseldorf, said Nathan Kalmanowicz, an official in Germany’s Central Council of Jews.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel called Spiegel an “exemplary democrat.”

“He warned, where others remained silent. His engagement for civil courage, for tolerance and mutual respect and against hatred of foreigners and anti-Semitism set standards,” Merkel said.

In 2003, Spiegel and thenChancellor Gerhard Schroeder sealed a historic agreement that put the Jewish community on the same legal footing as Germany’s main Christian churches. The accord, signed on the 58th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp, tripled the annual government funding for the council to $3.8 million.

To escape persecution under the Nazis, some members of Spiegel’s family fled in 1939 from their home in Warendorf to Belgium, where Spiegel, then 2, was hidden by Roman Catholic farmers.

His father survived the Buchenwald, Auschwitz and Dachau concentration camps.

Spiegel’s older sister, Rosa, was last heard of in the Bergen-Belsen camp.

After the war, Spiegel returned with his mother to Warendorf, in West Germany, where they were reunited with his father.

He started working at the newly founded weekly Jewish newspaper, the Allgemeine Juedische Wochenzeitung, which is today published as the Juedische Allgemeine.

He stayed with the paper until 1965, when he became assistant to the secretary-general of the Central Council of Jews and editor of the Jewish Press Service.

Spiegel was named a vice president of the council in 1993 and president -- Germany’s top Jewish leader -- in 2000.

At the 2005 dedication of the national Holocaust Memorial in Berlin, Spiegel said the abstract monument failed to address a key question: “Why were members of a civilized people in the heart of Europe capable of planning and carrying out mass murder?”

Spiegel is survived by his wife and two daughters.