Lea Rosh (; born Edith Renate Ursula Rosh on 1 October 1936) is a German television journalist, publicist, entrepreneur and political activist. Rosh was the first female journalist to manage a public broadcasting service in Germany and in the 1970s the first anchorwoman of , a major political television program. She has been a member of the SPD since 1968. Rosh has received major public awards (e.g. the Bundesverdienstkreuz), and is a controversial and influential figure in the local political scene of Berlin. The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin is seen as her main and personal achievement. Background Rosh was born in Berlin in 1936. Her mother's father was a Jewish court singer. Her father was killed in the winter of 1944 as a Wehrmacht soldier in Poland. At age 18 she left the Lutheran Church in Germany, she describes herself as an atheist. She began to use the first name Lea instead of her given name of Edith, describing the name Edith, which is of Old English origin, as "horribly German". Rosh worked at various German radio and television services, including the Sender Freies Berlin and the ZDF. From 1991 to 1997 she was appointed director of the Hanover studio of the Norddeutscher Rundfunk (NDR), being the first woman to hold a comparable post in the history of German broadcasting. Motivated by historian Eberhard Jäckel, she was one of the primary forces who lobbied from 1988 onwards for over 17 years for the construction of the widely controversial Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, completed in May 2005. She has been chairman of the (Society for the Promotion of Raising a Monument to the Murdered Jews of Europe) since 1995, and vice chairman of the board of trustees of the (Foundation for the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe) since 1999. In 1990, Rosh and Eberhard Jäckel were awarded the Geschwister-Scholl-Preis for their joint work, . In 2006, Rosh was awarded the Bundesverdienstkreuz. Lea Rosh's husband died in 2008. The late Jakob Schulze-Rohr was an architect and building contractor in Berlin and a brother of the film director . Since 2007 Lea Rosh has held a post as a lecturer at the Potsdam in the fields of Moderating and Media training. Public debate Michael Naumann first had opted against the Berlin Holocaust Monument and (similar to the less known Eike Geisel) had interpreted