historium:

Shabbat service, lead by Rabbi Herschel Schacter, for the newly liberated inmates of Buchenwald; 1945

Rabbi Herschel Schacter was a chaplain in the US 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.