PAUL SPIEGEL held one of the most delicate posts in European public life. As president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany his every utterance was liable to touch raw nerves.

In Germany the Holocaust is not history; its aftermath is the stuff and content of everyday politics. All parties represented in the German parliament, the Bundestag, share an unyielding “never again” attitude. But at the slightest whiff of danger, real or perceived, every Central Council president since the late l940s has felt obliged to warn and protest. Spiegel was no exception.

The ever-present Holocaust memory also influences most government policies, internal and external. They range from welfare to education, and embrace tactical and constitutional questions about the most effective way to check the neo-Nazi National Democratic Party. And they extend to the federal Government’s policy towards the state of Israel — because today’s German Jewry still feels insecure, Spiegel has maintained the Central Council’s unwavering support for Israel. As far as the Central Council is concerned, public policies are always combustible and potentially explosive.

Relations with the federal Government were greatly smoothed during his incumbency of more than six years because he had an easy rapport with Gerhard Schröder, who was Chancellor for most of that time. Each understood the other. That is why the Spiegel presidency is likely to go down as the most tranquil in the post-Holocaust history of German-Jewish relations.

His initial task was mountainous because he followed Ignaz Bubis, a man of great charisma and powerful personality, who had dominated the Central Council and at times the German media. By contrast, Spiegel brought to the post personal modesty, warmth and kindness, and a transparent decency.

His achievement is the greater in that the Central Council is a small organisation with a tiny staff and massive tasks. Whatever its formal constitution says, the heavy duties rest in the hands of the president. He is the instant spokesman and decision maker. Spiegel performed his tasks with speed, judgment and never-flagging devotion.

Inside an often fissiparous and at times even quarrelsome community, Spiegel had to act as peacekeeper and peacemaker.

For some weeks last autumn the Berlin Jewish community, the largest in Germany with more than 10,000 members, made almost daily headlines in the national and local press with factional strife and personal vendettas — until Spiegel stepped in, ordering it to get off the front pages and settle its quarrels. Several resignations followed in Berlin, and there has been barely a squeak out of that community since.

For some years also hostility reigned between the Central Council and the growing Liberal Jewish movement. When this began to impinge upon relations with the federal Government, Spiegel realised it was time to make peace. He decided upon an instant and total change of course, and carried it out with both grace and determination. He showed leadership of high calibre and without a hint of spite or rancour.

The other big challenge of his presidency was the integration of 100,000 immigrants from the former Soviet Union into local Jewish communities, that numbered in total no more than 25,000, and into the wider German society. He found the financial resources to do so, mostly from public funds, and he tackled the inherently prickly problems with drive and commitment.

Spiegel was born into a family of horse and cattle traders in the small West German town of Warendorf, near Münster, when the Hitler regime was already about five years in power. Less than a year later, on November 9, l938, came the burning of the synagogues. It was the signal to German Jewry that they had no hope of survival in that country, and the Spiegel family fled to Brussels. They had been there for just over a year when the German army seized Belgium in May l940.

Spiegel’s sister was rounded up during a secret police raid and killed in one of the death camps. His father was hounded through three of the most notorious concentration camps, Dachau, Buchenwald and Auschwitz, but survived. Spiegel himself, as a four-year-old boy, was hidden by a farming family in Flanders.

Unusually for survivors of that disaster, the Spiegel family decided to return to their home town and start life afresh in Warendorf. Spiegel, in later life and especially in his official leadership position, never showed any trace of bitterness.

He began his working life as a journalist, and spent nearly two decades working for both Jewish journals and West German daily newspapers, like the Westfälische Rundschau in Dortmund and the Neue Rhein Zeitung in Düsseldorf. He ended his journalistic career as editor of a fashion and home decoration magazine.

For 12 years thereafter he was the public affairs director for a Düsseldorf bank, before setting up an agency for speakers and musicians, both pop and classical, as well as an events organiser. That remained his “day job” until his death from pneumonia after a heart attack.

He married Gisele Spatz in l964, and is survived by her and by two daughters.

Paul Spiegel, president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, journalist, agent and events organiser, was born on December 31, l937. He died on April 30, 2006, aged 68.