Death
of Ignatz Bubis Champion
of German Jews Dies at 72 By GEORGE BOEHMER
Associated Press
Writer FRANKFURT,
Germany (AP) --
Ignatz Bubis, a Jew
who survived the Nazis and returned to
Germany to become a champion of the
nation's Jews and its "Voice of the
Conscience," died Friday. He was
72. Bubis died after a short illness, the
Central Council of Jews said in a
statement. Elected chairman and the head of
Germany's growing Jewish population in
1992, Bubis often made headlines as an
outspoken voice against intolerance,
participating in demonstrations against
radical rightist attacks and giving
interviews to newspapers and TV talk
shows. As the public face of Germany's Jewish
community, Bubis never backed down from
his insistence that Germans must still
actively remember the Holocaust and stood
up to those who said the opposite. "The Jewish world has lost a great
champion of human rights who embodied the
Jewish experience from the depths of the
Holocaust to the renaissance of Jewish
identity and peoplehood," said Elan
Steinberg, executive director of the
World Jewish Congress in New York. In an interview
with Stern magazine last month, Bubis said
he felt he had accomplished "nearly
nothing" in his seven years as the
chairman of the Central Council of Jews in
Germany. "I wanted to do away with these
divisions -- here Germans, there Jews," he
said. Bubis was
leader of a Jewish community that has
been growing again since the fall of
the Berlin Wall. Since 1989, Germany's
Jewish community has grown from about
29,000 to 70,000 due to the migration
of East European Jews. Bubis was born in Wroclaw in what is
now Poland on Jan. 17, 1927. His father
was a civil servant. When he was 8, his
family moved further east because of
stepped-up Nazi activity near the
border. When he was 15, Bubis saw his father
marched away by the Nazis. He never saw
him again. A brother and a sister also
died under the Nazis. Bubis survived a ghetto set up by the
Nazis for Jews, and a labor camp that was
a munitions factory at Czestochowa,
Poland. He was freed from the camp on Jan.
16, 1945, when the Soviet Red Army moved
into Poland as the World War II Allies
began closing in on Hitler's military.
Bubis returned to Germany after the
war. As arguments increased in recent years
over building a Holocaust memorial in
Berlin, Bubis said he supported such a
move, but preferred better upkeep of the
actual sites of Nazi atrocities -- the
concentration camp memorials. When parliament finally approved the
Berlin memorial in June, Bubis said he was
pleased because he never thought it would
really happen after 11 years of on-again,
off-again debate. That same month, Bubis fell, broke his
leg and was forced to use a wheelchair,
although he strived to meet his many
commitments. Although Bubis is a German citizen, he
told Stern that he wants to be buried in
Israel because he fears his grave will be
desecrated. The marble gravestone of
Bubis' prececessor, Heinz Galinski,
was destroyed by a bomb in December.
Police suspect right-wing extremists, but
no one has been charged. Bubis is survived by his wife, Ida, and
their daughter, Naomi Ann. Funeral plans
were not immediately announced. | 
According
to an article in the Aug. 16 Israeli
newspaper Haaretz, Bubis' grave has
already been desecrated by an artist named
Meir Mendelssohn. He had asked to
be buried in Israel so that his grave
might escape the neo-Nazi
vandals.
write
to David Irving