|
Trending Topics
|
U.S. Army Chaplain Who Told the Jews of Buchenwald: "You Are Free"
(New York Times) Margalit Fox - Rabbi Herschel Schacter died last week at 95 after a career as one of the most prominent modern Orthodox rabbis in the U.S. On April 11, 1945, Schacter was the first Jewish chaplain to enter the Buchenwald camp in Germany, which had just been liberated by Gen. George S. Patton's Third Army. He would remain at Buchenwald for months, tending to survivors and helping to resettle thousands of Jews. Schacter said afterward, at first it seemed as though there was no one left alive, with hundreds of bodies strewn everywhere. He was led to filthy barracks where men lay on raw wooden planks stacked from floor to ceiling. "Shalom Aleichem, Yidden," Schacter cried in Yiddish, "ihr zint frei!" (Peace be upon you, Jews, you are free). As he passed a mound of corpses, Schacter spied a small boy, Prisoner 17030, hiding in terror. "What's your name, my child?" he asked in Yiddish. "Lulek," he replied. Rabbi 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. Lulek, who eventually settled in Palestine, grew up to be Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau, the Ashkenazi chief rabbi of Israel from 1993 to 2003 who is now the chief rabbi of Tel Aviv.