The youngest survivor of the Buchenwald concentration camp, Lau arrived in the Land of Israel with a brother in 1945. He was the chief rabbi of Netanya from 1978 to 1988 and of Tel Aviv from 1988 to 1993, when he became the Ashkenazi chief rabbi of Israel for a decade. An outspoken advocate on the importance of Holocaust education and memory, he became the chair of the advisory Yad Vashem council in 2008. He has been called a “consensus rabbi” linking Haredi and Modern Orthodox Jews.