Rabbi Herschel Schacter,
the first Jewish chaplain to enter Nazi Germany’s Buchenwald prison camp after
it was liberated by the U.S. Army, has died in New York, on March 26, 2013.
Schacter’s son, Rabbi Jacob Schacter, said
his father died from natural causes Thursday at a hospice residence in the
Riverdale section of the Bronx. He was 95.
According to an account in the New York
Times, the smoke was still rising as Schacter rode through the gates of Buchenwald:
Source:
Stars & Stripes (newspaper
for US Armed Forces overseas) |
It was April 11, 1945, and Gen. George
Patton’s Third Army had liberated the concentration camp scarcely an hour
before. Schacter was attached to the Third Army’s VIII Corps.
He remembered, he later said, the sting of
smoke in his eyes, the smell of burning flesh and the hundreds of bodies. He
said afterward, it seemed as though there was no one left alive. In the camp,
he encountered a young American lieutenant who knew his way around.
“Are there any Jews alive here?” the rabbi
asked him. He was led to the Kleine Lager, or Little
Camp, a smaller camp within the larger one. There, in filthy barracks, men lay
on raw wooden planks stacked from floor to ceiling. They stared down at the
rabbi, in his unfamiliar military uniform, with unmistakable fright.
“Shalom Aleichem, Yidden,”
Schacter cried in Yiddish, “Ihr zint frei!” — “Peace be upon
you, Jews, you are free!” He ran from barracks to barracks, repeating
those words. He was joined by those Jews who could walk, until a stream of
people swelled behind him.
As he passed a mound of corpses, Schacter
spied a flicker of movement. Drawing closer, he saw a small boy, Prisoner
17030, hiding in terror behind the mound. “I was afraid of him,” the child
would recall long afterward in an interview with The New York Times. “I knew
all the uniforms of SS and Gestapo and Wehrmacht, and all of a sudden, a new
kind of uniform. I thought, ‘A new kind of enemy.’ ”
|
With tears streaming down his face, Schacter
picked the boy up. “What’s your name, my child?” he asked in Yiddish. “Lulek,” the child replied. “How old are you?” the rabbi
asked. “What difference does it make?” Lulek, who was
7, said. “I’m older than you, anyway.”
“Why do you think you’re older?” Rabbi
Schacter asked, smiling. “Because you cry and laugh like a child,” Lulek replied. “I haven’t laughed in a long time, and I
don’t even cry anymore. So which one of us is older?”
He remained for months, tending to survivors,
leading religious services in a former Nazi recreation hall and eventually
helping to resettle thousands of Jews.
Schacter discovered nearly a thousand orphaned
children in Buchenwald. He and a colleague, Rabbi Robert Marcus, helped arrange
for their transport to France — a convoy that included Lulek
and the teenage Elie Wiesel — as well as to Switzerland and Palestine.
For decades afterward, Schacter said, he
remained haunted by his time in Buchenwald, and by the question survivors put
to him as he raced through the camp that first day.
“They were asking me, over and over, ‘Does
the world know what happened to us?’ ” Rabbi Schacter
told The Associated Press in 1981. “And I was thinking, ‘If my own father had
not caught the boat on time, I would have been there, too.’ ”
Herschel
Schacter was born in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn on Oct. 10, 1917, the
youngest of 10 children of parents who had come from Poland. His father,
Pincus, was a seventh-generation shochet, or ritual slaughterer of kosher
animals; his mother, the former Miriam Schimmelman, was a real estate manager.
Mr. Schacter earned a bachelor’s degree
from Yeshiva University in New York in 1938; in 1941, he received ordination at
Yeshiva from Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, a founder of the Modern Orthodox
movement. He spent about a year as a pulpit rabbi in Stamford, Conn., before
enlisting in the Army as a chaplain in 1942.
After Buchenwald was liberated, he spent
every day there distributing matzo; leading services for Shavuot, which
celebrates the revelation of the Torah to Moses at Mount Sinai, and which fell
that year in May; and conducting Friday night services. At one of those
services, Lulek and his older brother, Naftali, were able to say Kaddish for
their parents, Polish Jews who had been killed by the Nazis.
Discharged from the Army with the rank of
captain, Rabbi Schacter became the spiritual leader of the Mosholu Jewish
Center, an Orthodox synagogue on Hull Avenue in the north Bronx. He was a
leader of many national Jewish groups, including the Conference of Presidents
of Major Jewish Organizations, of which he was a past
chairman. He was most recently the director of rabbinic services at Yeshiva.
Rabbi Schacter, who in 1956 went to the Soviet Union with an American
rabbinic delegation, was an outspoken advocate for the rights of Soviet Jews
and an adviser on the subject to President Richard M. Nixon.
A resident of the Riverdale section of the Bronx, Rabbi Schacter
is survived by his wife, the former Pnina Gewirtz, whom he married in 1948; a
son, Rabbi Jacob J. Schacter, who confirmed his father’s death; a daughter,
Miriam Schacter; 4 grandchildren; and 8 great-grandchildren.
And what of Lulek, the orphan Rabbi Schacter rescued from
Buchenwald that day? Lulek, who eventually settled in Palestine, grew up to be
Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau. Rabbi Lau, who recounted his childhood exchange with
Rabbi Schacter in a memoir, published in English in 2011 as “Out of the Depths,” was the Ashkenazi chief
rabbi of Israel from 1993 to 2003 and is now the chief rabbi of Tel Aviv.
When Rabbi Lau told Mr.
Obama of his rescue by Rabbi Schacter — he
thanked the American people for delivering Buchenwald survivors “not from
slavery to freedom, but from death to life” — he had not yet learned of Rabbi
Schacter’s death the day before.
“For me, he was alive,” Rabbi Lau said in an interview with The Times. “I speak about him with
tears in my eyes.”