He became a poster child for miraculous survival, and the inhumanity of the Nazi regime, after U.S. Army chaplain Rabbi Herschel Schacter detected him hiding behind a heap of corpses when the camp was liberated.

[2][3] Lau has credited a teen prisoner with protecting him in the camp (later determined by historian Kenneth Waltzer to be Fedor Mikhailichenko).

In 1988, after the death of his father-in-law, Lau was appointed to serve as chief rabbi of Tel Aviv, a position he held until 1993.

On 9 June 2005, Lau was reinstalled as Chief Rabbi of Tel Aviv returning to the post he served from 1985 until 1993.

He is one of the few figures in the Haredi world who has managed to gain the trust and admiration of both the Sephardic and Ashkenazic population.

Lau's spokespeople said that the fact that he had been approved by the (presumably heterogeneous) Prize Committee spoke for itself.3 In 1993, Rav Lau had an hour-long meeting with John Paul II at the Pope's summer residence of Castel Gandolfo, seeking the Vatican's moral support for the latest peace moves in the Middle East.

Some critics in the Israeli media wrote that Lau was more focused on maintaining his image as a progressive than in implementing such positions in the rabbinate's policies, specifically major issues such as agunot, civil marriage, the status of Shabbat, and other divisive topics that continue to be relevant to many in the secular community vis-a-vis the Chief Rabbinate, which under Lau's leadership usually sided with the Orthodox perspective.

[15] On 14 April 2011, he was awarded the Legion of Honor (France's highest accolade) by French President Nicolas Sarkozy, in recognition of his efforts to promote interfaith dialogue.

At the 2006 commemoration of the massacre of Babi Yar, Lau pointed out that if the world had reacted, perhaps the Holocaust might never have happened.

So a few weeks later in January 1942, near Berlin in Wannsee, a convention can be held with a decision, a final solution to the Jewish problem.