Yehuda Widawski

Yehuda Aharon Widawski was born on 25 July 1919 in Turek, a town near Lodz in central Poland, into a religious Zionist household. His parents, Abraham and Dobrish-Leah, ran a haberdashery wholesale business in Turek into the early 1930s. Polish biographical sources also record him as Jan Widawski.

The family moved to Lodz, where grandparents already lived. He finished a public primary school in 1935 and attended evening gymnasium classes without completing them, because he was already building a textile trade. Still a teenager, he obtained a Lodz provincial permit to supply textiles to the army and to private shops from premises on Lipowa Street. He lived on Zachodnia Street and took part in revisionist Zionist activity linked to local followers of Ze'ev Jabotinsky.

He later remembered prewar Lodz as a city of closed shops on Shabbat, yeshivas and Torah scholars, including his brother Gabriel, who studied at the Chachmei Lublin Yeshiva.

After the German invasion, Widawski was confined in the Lodz Ghetto from early 1940. He first ran a small haberdashery workshop at home, then a ghetto "resort" (workshop) on Mlynarska Street employing dozens of women making collars and trimmings for German orders. He also organised illegal work and sewing training for girls after ghetto schooling ended, and he helped "age" children in registration papers so they could be listed as workers and, where possible, protected from deportation.

On 29 August 1944 he was among those sent on the final transport from Lodz to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Most of his immediate family were murdered. He and his brother Yehoshua survived selection and were transferred to Friedland forced labour, assembling aircraft wings until liberation on 9 May 1945.

Back in Lodz he restarted textile production. After immigrating to Israel in 1950 he worked in textiles in Tel Aviv with partners, then from the mid-1950s in automotive spare-parts wholesaling. From 1978 his public life's work shifted to Poland: mapping and restoring Jewish graves in Lodz and beyond, identifying more than 3,000 burials with archival help, financing matzevot on the ghetto burial field, and restoring rabbinic ohelim. Families worldwide sought his help to find graves and reconstruct lost histories. He visited Poland many times a year after diplomatic ties resumed, often for the 29 August commemorations of the ghetto's liquidation.

After the war Widawski married Dobrish, nee Wassercug, a fellow survivor. Their son Avraham was born in Poland around 1947; their daughter Leah was born in Tel Aviv and named for her grandmother murdered in the Holocaust. The family settled in Tel Aviv after arriving in Israel on 31 January 1950.

At his 100th birthday celebration in 2019 in Givat Shmuel, reports said he had two children, six grandchildren and sixteen great-grandchildren, and that he remained remarkably active. He was a board member of the Association of Former Lodz Residents in Israel and cooperated closely with Yad Vashem, which holds about six hours of his Holocaust testimony.

Widawski framed survival not as an end but as a duty to rebuild. In interviews he said his answer to the Nazis was that he had lived, built a family and lived in Israel. In a ynet interview years before his death he stated: "My revenge on the Nazis is that they lost, and we have the State of Israel. We are free and strong, and no one will ever be able to destroy us again."

His decades of cemetery work expressed the same conviction: names and graves must not vanish. He treated archival honesty and physical restoration as acts of national and Jewish continuity, not only private mourning.

Yehuda Aharon Widawski died in Israel on 13 September 2026, during Rosh Hashanah, at the age of 107. Israeli and international reports described him as Israel's oldest living Holocaust survivor at the time of his death. The cause of death was not made public in major tributes.

President Isaac Herzog issued a public tribute recalling hosting Widawski at the President's Residence when Widawski was 104, and praising his decision to return to Poland to search for his grandmother's grave, work that grew into decades of cemetery restoration and the identification of more than 3,000 graves. Herzog cited Widawski's line that revenge was that the Nazis lost and that Israel exists, calling his life a testament to life, remembrance and national rebirth.

Widawski's legacy joins three strands: survival of the Lodz Ghetto, Auschwitz and Friedland; the building of a family and business life in the State of Israel; and a late-life mission to restore Jewish cemeteries and names in Poland. Thousands of marked graves in Lodz and restored ohelim for Hasidic dynasties stand as physical results of that mission.

His 2012 torchlighting at Yad Vashem placed his personal story in Israel's national ceremony of Holocaust remembrance. Polish and Israeli honours recognised his role in Polish-Jewish dialogue. For many former Lodz families abroad, he was the person who could still open archives, maps and cemetery paths that the war had closed.

• 2009: Knight's Cross of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland, awarded by President Lech Kaczynski for outstanding contributions to Polish-Jewish dialogue and cooperation between nations
• 2009: Badge "For Merit for the City of Lodz," presented during 65th-anniversary commemorations of the liquidation of the Litzmannstadt Ghetto
• 2012: Selected to light a memorial torch at Yad Vashem's official Holocaust Remembrance Day ceremony in Jerusalem
• Ongoing recognition through Yad Vashem testimony holdings and membership activity with former Lodz residents in Israel