Lea Rosh
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Lea Rosh (born October 1, 1936 in Berlin; birth name Edith Renate Ursula Rosh) is a German television journalist and publicist. She is best known for being elected the "most embarrassing Berliner" (peinlichste Berlinerin) by the readers of the magazine Tip in 2003.
Her father was killed in the winter of 1944 as a Wehrmacht soldier in Poland. At age 18 she left the Evangelical Church and began to use the first name Lea instead of her given name of Edith, which she described as "terribly German" (schrecklich deutsch).
She is one the primary forces who lobbied for over 17 years for the construction of the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, completed in May 2005.
Rosh created considerable controversy when, at the museum's dedication on May 10, 2005, she held up a molar which she had retrieved from Belzec concentration camp in 1988, promising to place the tooth in a column at the memorial. This outraged several prominent German Jewish leaders, notably Paul Spiegel, who described the idea as "irreverent." Her activities are deeply controversial both in the Jewish and non-Jewish communities. It was widely felt that Rabbi Chaim Rozwaski expressed the wish of many Jews and Germans, when he asked Ms. Rosh: “Leave the Jews in peace – the dead and the living.”
