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Israel’s oldest Holocaust survivor, Yehuda Aharon Widawski, has died aged 107 after spending decades preserving the memory of Jewish life destroyed in the Shoah.
Widawski, who survived Auschwitz and forced labour under the Nazis, died on Friday, on the eve of Rosh Hashanah.
He was born in Turek, Poland, in 1919 and later moved with his family to Łódź. When the Nazis established the Łódź Ghetto in 1940, the family was forced inside.
They were deported to Auschwitz in August 1944, where Widawski’s parents, Abraham and Leah, and his eldest brother, Gabriel, were murdered.
Eight days after arriving, Widawski and his younger brother, Jehoszua, were sent to Friedland, a forced labour camp in the Gross-Rosen concentration camp system.
The camp was liberated in May 1945. Of their family, only Widawski, his younger brother and an uncle survived the Holocaust.
Israeli President Isaac Herzog paid tribute to Widawski, recalling meeting him at the President’s Residence when he was 104.
“When he was 104 years old, I had the privilege of hosting Yehuda at the President’s Residence together with his magnificent family,” Herzog said.
“Yehuda once said that his revenge against the Nazis was that they lost – and that we have the State of Israel. Indeed, his life was a magnificent testament to the victory of life, memory, and revival.”
After the war, Widawski married Lea Dobrysz and set up a textile factory in Poland. He also helped the Irgun smuggle weapons to Israel before making aliyah in 1950, and he established several businesses.
In 1978, he returned to Łódź in search of his mother’s grave. The visit began decades of work tracing the burial places of Jews whose graves had been lost.
He eventually identified more than 3,000 graves and worked to restore the Jewish cemetery in Łódź.
In 2012, Widawski was chosen to light a torch at Israel’s national Yom HaShoah ceremony at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem.
He is survived by his son and daughter, four grandchildren and 12 great-grandchildren.
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