Reb Shlomo of Bobov was once traveling by car on Manhattan’s FDR drive. When the car turned onto the exit ramp leading to East 42^nd Street he caught a brief glimpse of the United Nations headquarters whose towering Secretariat building standing immediately beside the low flat-topped building housing the General Assembly of the UN looks exactly like a gravestone rising from a cemetery. Someone pointed out the building and the Rebbe remarked without missing a beat “This is the place where the truth was buried and that is the tombstone.”

The teller of this story Reb Shlomo’s chassid and disciple Professor Moishe Zvi (Harry) Reicher can attest to the truth of that statement through personal knowledge. As the World Agudath Yisrael’s liaison to the United Nations for a period of nearly nine years from 1995 to 2004 he has been witness to the often nefarious workings of that organization when it comes to the State of Israel.

Yet despite the UN’s disappointing track record concerning the Jewish State the World Agudath Yisrael does have to its credit a long list of accomplishments when it comes to protecting Jewish interests throughout the world. Many of those successes can be traced to Professor Reicher who like a modern-day Mordechai has managed to accomplish things behind the scenes that ambassadors of countries armed with budgets in the billions have not succeeded in achieving.

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