I read this inspiring story about this courageous and idealistic Jewish rabbi named Herschel Schacter. Ideal for Holy Week reading.

I highly recommend that we read and share this story to others. Uphold goodness, faith and righteousness in this world! Best wishes!

(Image below of Buchenwald student conference - David Shechter - September 2011, sourced from haaretz.com)







Rabbi Herschel Schacter Is Dead at 95; Cried to the Jews of Buchenwald: ‘You Are Free’

via Yad Vashem

Rabbi Herschel Schacter leading the Shavuot prayer service for survivors in the Buchenwald camp in Germany in 1945.

New York Times article by  Margalit Fox

Pu

blished: March 26, 2013

The smoke was still rising as Rabbi Herschel Schacter rode through the gates of Buchenwald.

Multimedia

Photographs

Buchenwald’s Liberation, as Seen by Louis Nemeth

Librado Romero/The New York Times

Rabbi Herschel Schacter in 1999.

It was April 11, 1945, and Gen. George S. Patton’s Third Army had liberated the concentration camp scarcely an hour before. Rabbi Schacter, who was attached to the Third Army’s VIII Corps, was the first Jewish chaplain to enter in its wake.

That morning, after learning that Patton’s forward tanks had arrived at the camp, Rabbi Schacter, who died in the Riverdale section of the Bronx on Thursday at 95 after a career as one of the most prominent Modern Orthodox rabbis in the United States, commandeered a jeep and driver. He left headquarters and sped toward Buchenwald.

By late afternoon, when the rabbi drove through the gates, Allied tanks had breached the camp. He remembered, he later said, the sting of smoke in his eyes, the smell of burning flesh and the hundreds of bodies strewn everywhere.

He would remain at Buchenwald for months, tending to survivors, leading religious services in a former Nazi recreation hall and eventually helping to resettle thousands of Jews.

For his work, Rabbi Schacter was singled out by name on Friday by Yisrael Meir Lau, the former Ashkenazi chief rabbi of Israel, in a meeting with President Obama at Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial.

In Buchenwald that April day, Rabbi Schacter 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,” Rabbi 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, Rabbi 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, Rabbi 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?”

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 — as well as to Switzerland, a group personally conveyed by Rabbi Schacter, and to Palestine. 

For decades afterward, Rabbi 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; 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 (liberation had come just a week after Passover); 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 presided there from 1947 until it closed in 1999.

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; four grandchildren; and eight 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.

On Friday, 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 on Monday. “I speak about him with tears in my eyes.”

EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW!  What are the success secrets of the remarkable Jewish people?  How can we improve our memory?  Bull Market, Bull Sheet column by Wilson Lee Flores The Philippine Star May 28, 2012

Eran Katz poses with a display of his international best-selling book, Where Did Noah Park the Ark?

Pessimism is a luxury that a Jew can never allow himself.                 —Golda Meir
  
Jewish people are world-class entrepreneurs and also intellectuals like Albert Einstein. What are their success secrets, considering that for 2,000 years they have been one of the persecuted minorities worldwide?

(Photo below of the world's most famous scientific genius who was offered the presidency of Israel, German Jew Albert Einstein)




Among the world’s top Jewish billionaires are Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg with his former Harvard schoolmates and Facebook co-founders Dustin Moskovitz and Brazilian-Jewish Eduardo Saverin. Google, Inc. was also founded by young Jewish innovators Sergey Brin and Larry Page, each with $18.7 billion in personal wealth.




(Photo below of Google co-founder Sergey Brin)




We in the Philippines should have invited two famous Jewish casino billionaires in Macau and Las Vegas to invest in PAGCOR City — Sheldon Adelson of the Sands (net worth $24.9 billion) and rival Steve Wynn. Adelson has donated over $100 million to Birthright Israel, a non-profit that finances diaspora Jewish youths’ heritage trips to Israel.

(Photo below of Sands casino tycoon and philanthropist Sheldon Adelson)




(Photo below of Las Vegas casino tycoon Steve Wynn)





Other Jewish billionaires include World Jewish Congress (WJC) president and Neue Galerie New York art museum founder Ronald Lauder of the Estee Lauder cosmetics empire; former WJC president Edgar Bronfman Jr.; Oracle Corp. CEO Larry Ellison (net worth $36 billion); New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg ($22 billion); George Soros ($20 billion); computer mogul Michael Dell ($16.5 billion); Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer ($15.7 billion); Carl Icahn ($14 billion); Brazilian-Jewish banker Joseph Safra ($13.8 billion); Russian-Jewish Roman Abramovich ($12.1 billion); Lev Blavatnikm ($11.9 billion); fashion tycoon Ralph Lauren ($7.5 billion); plus many others.


(Photo below of Ronald Lauder)



(Photo below of Oracle founder Larry Ellison)





(Photo below of self-made billionaire and New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg)



(Activist self-made billionaire George Soros is a Holocaust survivor)





(Michael Dell)




(Photo below of Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer)



(Photo below of Carl Icahn)



(Photo below of Brazilian banker Joseph Safra)



(Photo of Russian tycoon Roman Abramovich)



(Photo below of Lev Blavatnikm)



(Photo below of fashion tycoon Ralph Lauren)




Thanks to the Ramos family of Powerbooks, National Book Store and also to the Embassy of Israel for arranging an exclusive Philippine STAR interview with memory guru and Where Did Noah Park the Ark? book author Eran Katz. A lot of his amazing memory-enhancing techniques from ancient Jewish traditions are detailed in the book.

Excerpts from the interview:

Memory & Motivation

PHILIPPINE STAR: Why are Jews good with memory and reputed to have the best intellect in the West, and with so many Nobel Prize winners?

ERAN KATZ: Jews in the world total only some 13.5 million, or less than the population of Metro Manila. About 5.7 million Jews live in Israel, and the rest are scattered as minorities worldwide. Jews are only 0.02 percent of the world’s population but 35 percent of all Nobel Prize winners.

The Jewish people have to remember, it is a commandment from God. One of the most important factors to a better memory is motivation, and a commandment from God is the greatest motivation for religious people like Jews through the centuries. What can the rest of the world learn from this? If we use motivation, we can improve our memory.

(A menorah, sacred Jewish symbol which means "Israel is a light unto nations")




(The flag of Israel, a country which is a bastion of dynamic democracy and economic progress in the Middle East)



Can you cite examples of this motivation factor and memory?

Whenever I talk in seminars and challenge students or people to memorize a number with 20 to 30 digits, people will say, “I will never remember,” but if I give you $1 million to do it, then you will. Now you have a better motivation.

In religious Hasidic schools in Israel, they give kids who are 5, 6 or 7 years old chocolates if they memorize well. In the Hasidic schools, there is also the custom of matchmaking and schools are segregated to exclusive boys’ or girls’ schools. Professional matchmakers choose spouses based on brains, so if you’re the smartest, a young man is matched to the most beautiful daughter of the richest family. Isn’t that a great motivation?

That's similar to ancient Chinese imperial civil service exams: scholars even from poor rural families could gain power, prestige and the best wives if they excelled academically.




My newest book, which will come out late this year, is entitled Five Missions for the Mind: Gifts from an Asian Student. It will discuss Asian ideas like how Korean Buddhist Chan masters can help erase memories, also Chinese persuasion skills.

In business or sales, the average success rate to persuade others on a deal is one out of 10 attempts; with this new book I’m helping readers bring it to nine out of 10. This is based on what the Chinese and the old Jews have in common — the biggest success secret is respect for time, meaning patience.

Eran, who holds the Guinness World Record for memory stunts, concentrates as he recites the random set of 30 numbers dictated by the audience.

I heard in your recent lecture that 83-year-old former Philippine First Lady Imelda Marcos sat in the front row. Other old people like 88-year-old Senate President Juan Ponce Enrile and 83-year-old Justice Serafin Cuevas are still sharp; why do you think they’re like that?

Mrs. Marcos came to me after my lecture and said, “You gave one very good tip on enhancing memory that I like, which is being enthusiastic about what you’re doing in your life, that’s the key to good memory and a good life.”

I think Imelda, the Senate President and the Justice should be inspirations for older people.
Many old people start losing their memory not because of biological reasons, but because of mental reasons.




They say, “My life is over, why make efforts to remember and learn new things?” Look at our Israel President Shimon Peres, 87 years old and still a remarkable leader.



I remember my grandmother — she was 75 years old when she went to the retirement home. The moment she entered, she began losing her memory. But if you’re like Imelda, Shimon Peres, Enrile or Cuevas, and like professors at old age who still want to contribute, teach and learn, then your brain will be sharp.

Where were your parents from? Was persecution a factor in Jewish success?

My grandfather and father were from Prague (in what is now the Czech Republic). My mother’s family was from Romania in the Transylvania region, so maybe Dracula was a relative (laughs).

(Photo below of Prague City)



(Photo below of Transylvania, Europe)




I think the success of the Jews was not just due to good memory, I believe it also has to do with being a persecuted minority. Why? It’s the survival instinct, because you have to think two, three and more times better than the locals. Because you’re not equal, so you must try harder.

By the way, how are you as part of the ethnic Chinese minority with regards to the Philippine-China conflict over the islands? Who will you side with?

Our family has been here for over 200 years. China is like our mother and the Philippines like our wife; in-laws often have quarrels, we shouldn’t take any sides but work to patch things up and help lessen misunderstandings.

Have you heard of Eli Cohen, he was an Egyptian Jew who loved Egypt and also never forgot his Israel roots, but many in their Jewish minority fled when both countries had wars. Here, in over 1,000 years of Philippine-China relations, there have been no wars between the two countries; in fact, local Chinese even fought alongside Filipinos in World War II against the Japanese invaders.

Not only do I know Eli Cohen, he died on May 18, 1965 at, I think, 4 a.m. in the morning. I was born two hours later, so I always said I must be somehow related.


(Images of the Israeli hero Eli Cohen)


What are other Jewish cultural reasons for your exceptional successes?

Another reason for success is the way Jews learn, like the method of deliberation, it’s question-and-answer style. Even in studying the Talmud, nothing is taken for granted. In Judaism, you are allowed to challenge your teachers.

According to Socrates and the Jews, knowledge is developed and accumulated not if the teacher taught you something, but when you make the conclusion yourself, then you will remember it better.

(The Talmud)



Any other tips on how people can improve their memory?

Unlike what most people mistakenly think, memory champions like myself who made it to the Guinness Book of World Records, we were not born this way, but we practice many hours on memory stunts.

Actually, I’ll break a myth about the prodigy, the so-called “photographic memory” of people looking at one page and memorizing everything; that never happened, it never was. The encouraging thing is that each and every one of us has the power to improve our memory.

Enhancing our memory is a skill like playing basketball, like singing, and in the same way, you can also improve your memory with practice and motivation. We humans usually only utilize 10 percent of our brainpower throughout our lifetime, and we can really improve more.

Additional notes: Eran Katz has stunned audiences all over the world; including the World Science Forum in South Korea.  Described as a “phenomenon” and the “memory guru,” Eran Katz has also been a popular guest on many radio and TV shows.

Katz is also a well-known author, publishing best-sellers in 12 countries and sold more than 500,000 copies. A regarded lecturer, companies like Hewlett-Packard, Google, AT&T and Texas Instruments have also recruited Mr. Katz’ services.

Let us all seek to improve our memories? 

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