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UNCLAS SECTION 01 OF 02 MUNICH 000357 
 
SIPDIS 
 
SIPDIS 
 
DEPT FOR EUR/AGS AND EUR/OHI 
 
E.O. 12958: N/A 
TAGS: PGOV PREL PINR GM
SUBJECT:  CHAROLOTTE KNOBLOCH ELECTED NEW PRESIDENT OF THE 
JEWISH COUNCIL IN GERMANY 
 
 
MUNICH 00000357  001.2 OF 002 
 
 
¶1.  On June 7, 2006, at age 73, Charolotte Knobloch was 
unanimously elected President of the Jewish Council in 
Germany following the death of Council President Paul 
Spiegel on April 30.  People who know her are confident she 
will be able to gain broad public support in her new 
capacity.  She has the reputation of being pragmatic and 
strong willed, but also open to compromise. 
 
¶2.  Ms. Knobloch had been a candidate for the post in 
January 2000, but was defeated by Paul Spiegel who was 
elected with six votes to Ms. Knobloch's three.  She 
remained one of two deputies, the other being Salomon Korn. 
Some had urged Korn to challenge Knobloch in 2006, but he 
ultimately decided not to run.  Ms. Knobloch first became a 
board member of the Jewish Council in Germany in 1996.  Two 
years later, at the request of President Ignatz Bubis, she 
became one of his two deputies.  In September 1999, she 
announced her candidacy to succeed Bubis. 
 
¶3.  In 1985, following the sudden death of President Lamm, 
Knobloch was the first woman elected President of Munich's 
Jewish community, a significant accomplishment given the 
community's reputation for being extremely orthodox, with a 
clear distinction between men and women in its synagogue. 
Although a compromise candidate at the time, she has been 
overwhelmingly reelected every two years since.  Munich has 
the second largest Jewish community (8,000) in Germany, 
after Berlin. 
 
¶4.  After the Second World War, only 60 out of 12,000 Jews 
who had lived in Munich returned.  Charlotte Neuland 
(Knobloch's maiden name) already had a visa to emigrate to 
the U.S. when she married businessman Samuel Knobloch. 
After starting a family, the couple was reluctant to start 
over in a new country, choosing instead to remain in 
Munich.  In 1981, Knobloch became a member of the Jewish 
Community in Munich. 
 
¶5.  Charlotte Knobloch was born in Munich in 1932, daughter 
of the renowned Jewish lawyer Siegfried Neuland, who had 
been a German soldier in the First World War.  Warned about 
his imminent arrest by the Nazis in 1936, Neuland was able 
to hide his daughter on a farm in a small Franconian 
village in Bavaria before he was forced to work in an 
ammunition factory.  He survived the war, almost blind and 
incurably ill.  Her mother, a Christian who had converted 
to the Jewish faith to marry Siegfried Neuland, divorced 
him before the war.  Knobloch's grandmother was deported to 
Auschwitz and, like many of her relatives, did not survive. 
Charlotte Knobloch only survived because the Catholic 
Franconian family with whom she lived told authorities she 
was the illegitimate child of one of their own daughters. 
Knobloch has three children, a daughter who works as a 
medical doctor in Israel, another as a lawyer in Paris, and 
a son who is a banker in Frankfurt. 
 
¶6.  In light of recent incidents of anti-Semitism, Ms. 
Knobloch has called on Jews in Germany not to allow 
themselves to become intimidated.  "The time is over when 
Jews were sitting on packed suitcases, and it won't come 
back," she said, calling on her fellow Jews to make clear 
they are an integral part of life in Germany.  One of her 
declared wishes is for the Jewish community to regain its 
prior strength:  In 1933, 550,000 Jews lived in Germany, 
today it's 200,000, with just half of them being members of 
Jewish Council. 
 
¶7.  The Munich Jewish Community is completing construction 
of a large new community center, with a school and 
synagogue, in the heart of the city not far from the site 
of the synagogue destroyed in November 1938.  The new 
center, costing approximately 72 million Euros, will be 
inaugurated on the anniversary of Kristallnacht in November 
2006, and was funded largely by the City of Munich and the 
State of Bavaria.  It is a significant achievement for Ms. 
Knobloch's tenure as leader of the Munich community and a 
concrete symbol of the revival of Jewish life in Germany. 
 
¶8.  Ms. Knobloch is a friend of ConGen Munich who welcomes 
contact with the Consul General and consistently attends 
our events.  She is a prominent and respected person, and 
her vocal support for the U.S. in general -- and in 
particular for U.S. policy in Iraq and Iran -- has 
supported our public diplomacy efforts.  Although openly 
skeptical of any effort to negotiate with Muslims, she 
agrees with our reading of the security challenge emanating 
from the Arab world in a way that many German leaders do 
not. 
 
¶9.  Previous reporting from Munich is available on our 
 
MUNICH 00000357  002.2 OF 002 
 
 
SIPRNET website at www.state.sgov.gov/p/eur/munich. 
 
¶10.  This message was coordinated with Embassy Berlin. 
 
ROONEY