Jewish activist Paul Spiegel, 68, dies

BERLIN (AP) — Paul Spiegel, a journalist and activist who fled the Nazis as a child during World War II and returned to Germany to eventually become the influential — and at times contentious — head of its main Jewish organization, died Saturday at 68.

Spiegel died of cancer in a hospital in Duesseldorf where he had been seriously ill for weeks, Nathan Kalmanowicz, a senior official in Germany's Central Council of Jews, said Sunday.

In 2003, Spiegel and then-Chancellor Gerhard Schroe- der sealed a historic agreement that put the Jewish community on a legal par with Germany's main Christian churches.

The accord, signed on the 58th anniversary of the Auschwitz death camp's liberation, tripled the annual government funding for the council to $3.8 million.

To escape persecution under the Nazis, his family fled to Belgium in 1939. — the year Germany invaded Poland to start World War II — where Spiegel was hidden by Catholic farmers.

After the war, Spiegel returned to Warendorf where he started working as a volunteer journalist on the newly founded weekly Jewish newspaper, the Allgemeine Juedische Wochenzeitung, which is today published as the Juedische Allgemeine.

He worked at the newspaper as an editor from 1958 until 1965 when he became assistant to the Secretary-General of the Central Council of Jews and editor of the Jewish Press Service.

After years of work with the Jewish community in Duesseldorf, Spiegel was named a vice president of the council in 1993 and president in 2000.