“The voice of your brothers’ blood is screaming”: Rabbi Herschel Schacter’s letter home

Abstract

[Editor’s Note: The recent publication of Rafael Medoff ’s The Rabbi of Buchenwald: The Life and Times of Herschel Schacter (Yeshiva University Press, 2021) celebrated and recounted the remarkable life of Rabbi Herschel Schacter (1917–2013) z”l, perhaps most well-known for his work as the first United States Army chaplain to enter and participate in the liberation of the Buchenwald concentration camp in April 1945. His parents had expressed very strong opposition to his decision to enlist in the army; in response he wrote an impassioned explanation of his decision to join the fight against Nazism. The text was cited, but not quoted in full, in The Rabbi of Buchenwald. TRADITION invited our editorial board member, Rabbi Jacob J. Schacter, to translate and annotate his father’s full letter. We have made an exception to the normal format of this column and are reproducing the original text of the letter, in R. Schacter’s exquisite penmanship, because the unpublished Hebrew text would be otherwise unavailable to our readers.]