His father, Pincus, was a seventh-generation shochet, or ritual slaughterer; his mother, the former Miriam Schimmelman, was a real estate manager.

[4] He earned a bachelor's degree from Yeshiva University in New York City in 1938 and semikhah (rabbinic ordination) from the Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary in 1941.

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.

[8] In 1971 Rabbi Schacter headed up the intra-denominational effort to maintain the Divinity exemption in the Vietnam draft.