Oldest Holocaust Survivor In Israel Passes Away At Age 107

JERUSALEM (VINnews) — Yehuda Aharon Widavski, a Holocaust survivor who endured the Lodz Ghetto and Auschwitz before devoting decades to preserving the memory of Poland’s destroyed Jewish communities, has passed away at the age of 107. Widavski, who was active in restoring the Beis Hachaim in Lodz after the Holocaust, was the oldest living Holocaust survivor in Israel.

Yehuda Widavski was born in Turek, Poland, on July 25, 1919, into a religious-Zionist family. His family later moved to Lodz, where he became involved in the Hashmonaim youth movement and worked in the family’s textile business. By the time the Lodz Ghetto was established in 1940, the family had moved into the ghetto and continued operating a sewing workshop, where Jewish workers were employed in forced labor for the Germans. Contemporary accounts say the workshop employed dozens of Jewish women.

On August 29, 1944, during the liquidation of the Lodz Ghetto, Widavski and his family were deported on the final transport from Lodz to Auschwitz-Birkenau. His parents, Abraham and Dabrish-Leah, and his older brother Gabriel were murdered there. His sister Yocheved was killed at Stutthof, while another brother, Chaim Moshe, was murdered at Buchenwald.

Widavski and his brother Yehoshua survived the selection at Auschwitz and were subsequently sent to the Friedland labor camp, a subcamp of Gross-Rosen. There, they were forced to work assembling aircraft wings.

In a 2019 interview marking his 100th birthday, Widavski recalled that prisoners were required to walk about nine kilometers each way to the factory. He also described himself as the informal leader of the workers and said he and others devised ways to cope with increasingly demanding production quotas. The camp was liberated by the Red Army on May 9, 1945.

After the war, Widavski returned to Lodz, married and rebuilt the family textile business. He also helped facilitate arms shipments for the Irgun from Poland, according to accounts of his life.

In 1950, he immigrated to Israel and settled in Tel Aviv. He and his wife eventually raised a family, and in later years Widavski described the establishment of his family and his life in Israel as his answer to the Nazis.

“I survived, built a family and lived in Israel,” was the essence of the message he repeatedly conveyed. In 2019, he described Israel’s existence as a form of victory over those who had sought to destroy European Jewry.

Decades after the Holocaust, Widavski returned to Poland, this time not as a refugee, but as a guardian of Jewish memory. In 1978, he traveled back to Lodz and began searching for the grave of his grandmother. His efforts led him to the city archives, where he obtained documents that helped him map burial sites in the enormous Jewish cemetery. The cemetery contains the graves of Jews buried there over roughly two centuries, including tens of thousands who died during the Lodz Ghetto period.

Widavski subsequently helped identify graves and restore or establish thousands of gravestones. Different accounts put the number at more than 3,000 graves in the cemetery, while later reports credit him and his associates with work on more than 7,000 gravestones. He also worked to restore burial sites and ohelim — structures built over the graves of prominent rabbis — including those of the Sochaczew and Modzitz Hasidic dynasties.

His work eventually made him an important resource for families searching for relatives who had been buried in Poland. He traveled there repeatedly and helped people locate ancestral graves and reconstruct pieces of family history that had been lost during the Holocaust.

In 2012, Widavski was selected to light one of the six memorial torches at Israel’s official Yom HaShoah ceremony at Yad Vashem. His selection recognized both his survival and his decades-long work preserving the memory of Jewish communities destroyed during the Holocaust.

At his 100th birthday celebration in 2019, attended by rabbis and chasidic leaders in Givat Shmuel, Widavski was described as remarkably active despite his age. Reports said he had two children, six grandchildren and 16 great-grandchildren.

For Widavski, survival was not the end of the story. He spent much of the rest of his life rebuilding what the Nazis had tried to erase, first through his family and life in Israel, and later through the graves, names and memories he helped restore in Poland.

His death at 107 closes the life of a man whose personal story spanned the destruction of European Jewry, the birth of the State of Israel and decades of efforts to ensure that the communities left behind would not be forgotten.