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Jewish woman the current frontrunner to become the next UN Secretary General
Rebeca Grynspan, former Vice President of Costa Rica, would become the first female UN leader if elected
One of the key candidates to become the next Secretary General of the United Nations is a Jewish diplomat from Costa Rica, who would become the first woman to hold the UN role if elected.
Rebeca Grynspan, a former vice-President of Costa Rica and the current head of the UN conference on trade and development (UNCTAD), received the most positive votes in the first of a series of straw polls of permanent and temporary UN Security Council members, held last week. She received ten “encourage”, one “discourage” and four “no opinion” votes – more than any other individual being mooted.
The current Secretary General, Antonio Gutierres of Portugal, is due to complete his second five-year term at the end of 2026. Under an informal arrangement, it is understood that the next UN leader will be from Central or South America.
Grynspan’s parents were born in Poland, but both left the country separately in the mid-1930s due to prescient fears regarding Nazi expansion – her maternal grandparents were subsequently murdered in the Holocaust. The pair met in a displaced persons camp in Cyprus after the war, with the British blocking the journey of thousands of Jews seeking to travel to the British Mandate. They got married and subsequently decided to move to Costa Rica rather than Israel, where they raised Rebeca (born in 1950) and her two sisters. One of those sisters would herself move to Israel; if chosen, the new UN Secretary General would become the first to have had family members who have served in the IDF.
Under a system introduced in the 1990s, a series of straw polls, initially anonymous, will be held over the coming months, indicating the general level of support for each proposed candidate. At some point, the votes will begin to indicate whether they have been cast by a permanent member of the UN Security Council. Ultimately, the council will recommend someone specific – with nine votes in favour required, as well as no vetoes – to the general assembly as a whole.
Grynspan, who married Saul Weisleder, a fellow Jewish Costa Rican, is understood to have a close relationship to the country’s Jewish community. During her tenure as head of UNCTAD, the organisation has released several reports highly critical of Israel. Other candidates for the UN Secretary General position include Michele Bachelet, former President of Chile and UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, whose past relationship with Israel has been more fraught.
There have been nine Secretary Generals of the UN since its foundation in 1946. One of those, Kurt Waldheim, a former President of Austria, was later prevented from entering the United States, after allegations arose that during World War Two he had been involved into the transportation of slave labourers, the deportation of Jews to concentration camps and death camps, and the mistreatment and execution of allied prisoners of war.
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