community in Berlin. In early 1998, a group of leading German intellectuals, including writer Günter Grass, argued that the monument should be abandoned. Several months later, when accepting the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, German novelist Martin Walser cited the Holocaust Memorial. Walser decried "the exploitation of our disgrace for present purposes." He criticized the "monumentalization", and "ceaseless presentation of our shame." And said: "Auschwitz is not suitable for becoming a routine-of-threat, an always available intimidation or a moral club [Moralkeule] or also just an obligation. What is produced by ritualisation, has the quality of a lip service". Eberhard Diepgen, mayor of Berlin 1991–2001, had publicly opposed the memorial and did not attend the groundbreaking ceremony in 2000. Diepgen had previously argued that the memorial is too big and impossible to protect. Reflecting the continuing disagreements, Paul Spiegel, then the president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany and a speaker at the opening ceremony in 2005, expressed reservations about the memorial, saying that it was "an incomplete statement." He said that by not including non-Jewish victims, the memorial suggests that there was a "hierarchy of suffering," when, he said, "pain and mourning are great in all afflicted families." In addition, Spiegel criticized the memorial for providing no information on the Nazi perpetrators themselves and therefore blunting the visitors' "confrontation with the crime." In 2005, Lea Rosh proposed her plan to insert a victim's tooth which she had found at the Bełżec extermination camp in the late 1980s into one of the concrete blocks at the memorial. In response, Berlin's Jewish community threatened to boycott the memorial, forcing Rosh to withdraw her proposal. According to Jewish tradition, the bodies of Jews and any of their body parts can be buried only in a Jewish cemetery. The memorial has also come under fire for perpetuating what some critics call an "obsession with the Holocaust". Michal Bodemann, a professor of sociology at the University of Toronto, is critical of what he calls the "permanent" and "brooding" culture of Holocaust commemoration in Germany. He studies postwar German-Jewish relations and told Die Tageszeitung that Germany's focus on the past overlooks the racist tendencies in society today and suggests a hopelessness toward the future. "My impression is that you hide yourself away in history in order to keep the present from cutting too close". Many critics found the "vagueness" of the stelae