Central Council of Jews in Germany

Originally based in the Rhenish areas (Düsseldorf and Bonn), it transferred its seat to Berlin after the Reunification of Germany (1990).

In its early years, its leadership was composed of native German Jews (Yekkes), while most of the Jewish community in Germany was made up of Polish-born Jewish Holocaust survivors who had come to Germany as displaced persons, fleeing from the sporadically anti-Zionist and antisemitic communist regime of Poland[citation needed].

[citation needed] After Nachmann's death (January 1988), Heinz Galinski (1912–1992), the chairman of the West Berlin Jewish community for 43 years, assumed the leadership of the Central Council and brought it stability and respectability.

In 2009, the Central Council criticised the Vatican over its decision to lift the excommunication on the bishops of the Society of Saint Pius X.

[2] It later boycotted a ceremony in the Berlin parliament which commemorated victims of the Holocaust, saying its leaders had been treated without the proper respect in previous years.