Head of main Jewish group in Germany dies

BERLIN (AP) -- 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 overnight of cancer in a hospital in Duesseldorf, Nathan Kalmanowicz, an official in Germany's Central Council of Jews, said Sunday.
In 2003, Spiegel and then-Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder sealed a historic agreement that put the Jewish community on the same legal footing 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, Spiegel's family fled to Belgium in 1939 where Spiegel, then 2, was hidden by Roman Catholic farmers. His father survived the Buchenwald, Auschwitz and Dachau camps. Spiegel's older sister, Rosa, was last heard of in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.
After the war, Spiegel returned with his mother to their hometown of Warendorf, 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.
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