World Jewish Congress

Charlotte Knobloch is the President of the Central Council of Jews in Germany ("Zentralrat"). In June 2006, she was elected to succeed the late Paul Spiegel. She is the first female leader of Germany's Jewish community.

Charlotte Knobloch was born in 1932 in Munich. Her father Fritz Neuland was a prominent attorney and state senator. During the war, she was hidden by a young Catholic woman on a farm in northern Bavaria and passed off as her illegitimate daughter. Her grandmother was killed in Auschwitz and her father survived the war as a slave laborer. They were reunited when she found him at a Munich hospital.

In 1951, Charlotte Neuland married Samuel Knobloch, a survivor of the Krakow ghetto. She had originally wanted to emigrate to the US but changed her mind after the birth of her first child and the professional success of her husband.

Decades later, after her three children finished school, Mrs. Knobloch became active in Munich's Jewish community, attacking a surge in far-right violence after national reunification in 1990 and what she called "the new anti-Semitism."

In 1985, she was elected President of the Jewish Community of Munich and Upper Bavaria. During her tenure, she spearheaded a new complex to serve Munich's 9,000 Jews, to open in November 2006. It will consist of a new main synagogue, a community center and a museum.

Mrs. Knobloch has also served since 2003 as Vice-President for the European Jewish Congress and, since January 2005, the World Jewish Congress.

About the World Jewish Congress

Charlotte Knobloch