Israel’s oldest Holocaust survivor, Yehuda Aharon Widawski, died at the age of 107 on the eve of Rosh Hashanah on Friday.
Yehuda, who survived Auschwitz and Nazi forced labour, devoted decades to preserving the memory of Poland’s destroyed Jewish communities.
Israeli President Isaac Herzog eulogised him in a Hebrew-language post, saying that he was saddened to hear of his passing.
“When he was 104 years old, I had the privilege of hosting Yehuda at the President’s Residence together with his magnificent family,” the president 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,” Herzog added.
Yehuda was born in 1919 in Turek, Poland, the second of four children in a traditional Zionist family, according to Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem. He subsequently moved with his family to Łódź.
The German occupiers created the Łódź Ghetto in 1940. The Widawskis were deported to Auschwitz in August 1944. Yehuda’s parents, Abraham and Leah, and his eldest brother, Gabriel, were immediately murdered.
Eight days later, Yehuda and his younger brother, Jehoszua, were transferred to the Friedland work camp, a sub-camp of the Gross-Rosen concentration camp system.
The camp was liberated by the Red Army on May 9, 1945, a day after the Germans abandoned the site while locking in the inmates.
Yehuda, his brother and an uncle were the only members of the family to survive.
Yehuda married Lea Dobrysz and the couple had a son. During his time in Poland, after establishing a textile factory, he helped the Zionist paramilitary organisation, Irgun, smuggle weapons to Israel. He immigrated to the Jewish state in 1950, where he founded several businesses.
In 1978, he decided to locate his mother’s grave and travelled back to Łódź.
Yehuda ended up identifying more than 3,000 graves of missing Jews over the course of decades. He also restored the Jewish cemetery in Łódź.
In 2012, the Holocaust survivor was chosen to light a torch at Israel’s Yom HaShoah ceremony at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem.
He leaves behind a son and a daughter, four grandchildren, and 12 great-grandchildren.
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