Rabbi Herschel Schacter served as Chairman of the Conference of Presidents from December 1967 to December 1969.

Rabbi Schacter was a chaplain in the Army during World War II and was the first US Army Chaplain to enter and participate in the liberation of the Buchenwald concentration camp on April 11, 1945. He remained there for months, leading services and tending to survivors.

The longtime rabbi of the Mosholu Jewish Center in the Bronx, NY, from 1947 until it closed in 1999, Rabbi Schacter also served as chairman of the National Conference on Soviet Jewry (now NCSEJ); president of Religious Zionists of America—Mizrachi; chairman of the Holocaust Commission of the JCRC of New York; and chairman of the JWB Jewish Chaplains Council for the Armed Forces.

He was an adjunct professor of homiletics and the director of the Department of Rabbinic Services at Yeshiva University and the Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary, his alma mater.

Rabbi Schacter passed away in 2013.