Yehuda Aaron Widawski, the oldest Holocaust survivor living in Israel, passed away on the eve of Rosh Hashanah at the age of 107. A businessman and devoted follower of the Sochaczew and Modzitz Hasidic dynasties, Widawski endured the horrors of the Lodz Ghetto and the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp before dedicating his life to raising a large family in Israel and executing a monumental historic mission to rehabilitate tens of thousands of Jewish graves and cemeteries throughout Poland.
Widawski was born in July 1919 in the town of Turek, near Lodz, into a religious-Zionist family that relocated to Lodz on the eve of World War II. After the war broke out, he showed extraordinary resourcefulness by securing housing for 15 members of his family within the sealed Lodz Ghetto. However, in August 1944, their world was shattered when the family was deported on the final transport to the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp.
His parents and most of his siblings were murdered upon arrival, with only Yehuda and his brother Yehoshua surviving the brutal selection. The two brothers were subsequently transferred to the Friedland labor camp. There, under the watchful eyes of Nazi guards, Widawski demonstrated daring ingenuity by devising a clandestine system to conceal aircraft parts, shielding fellow prisoners from severe collective punishment for falling short of demanding production quotas.
Following the defeat of Nazi Germany, Widawski returned to Lodz, where he married his wife, Dabrish (née Wassercug), who had also survived the Holocaust. During the immediate postwar period, he engaged in clandestine underground activity, facilitating weapons shipments to the Irgun (Etzel) in pre-state Israel.
In 1950, he immigrated to Israel with his family and settled in Tel Aviv, beginning a new chapter: raising a flourishing family and building a successful business career.
His extraordinary courage received formal state recognition in 2012, when he was selected to light a memorial torch at Yad Vashem’s official state ceremony on Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Day.Beyond his commercial endeavors and family life, Widawski left an indelible historical legacy through his tireless commemorative work. Beginning in 1978—under the strict oversight of Poland’s communist regime—he began making frequent journeys back to his native land. What began as an agonizing personal search for his grandmother’s grave evolved into an immense historic preservation undertaking: he directed the restoration of the sprawling Lodz Jewish Cemetery, refurbished thousands of headstones, and located and reconstructed the memorial mausoleums (ohels) of the Sochaczew and Modzitz Hasidic masters. Through this personal mission, Widawski personally assisted in identifying and rescuing more than 3,000 forgotten Jewish graves that had been lost to history for decades.