Herschel Schacter

Herschel Schacter (October 10, 1917 - March 21, 2013) was a chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, and a prominent student of Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik.

Schacter was born in Brownsville, Brooklyn and the youngest of 10 children. His parents came from Poland. His father, Pincus, was a seventh-generation shochet, or ritual slaughterer; his mother, the former Miriam Schimmelman, was a real estate manager.

Schacter earned a bachelor’s degree from Yeshiva University in New York City in 1938 and Semikhah (rabbinic ordination) from the Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary in 1941. He spent about a year as a pulpit rabbi in Stamford, Connecticut before enlisting in the Army in 1942.

During World War II, he was a chaplain in the Third Army's VIII Corps. and was the first US Army Chaplain to enter and participate in the liberation of the Buchenwald concentration camp on April 11, 1945, barely an hour after it had been liberated by Gen. George Patton's troops. Rabbi Schacter remained at Buchenwald for months, tending to survivors and leading religious services. One of the children whom he personally rescued from the camp was then 7-year old Yisrael Meir Lau, who grew up to become the Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of Israel. Later he aided in the resettlement of displaced persons, one of whom was teenaged Elie Wiesel, one of some thousand Jewish orphans liberated that day. He was discharged from the Army with the rank of captain.

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