Holocaust Survivor Yehuda Aaron Widawski Passes Away at 107
Yehuda Aaron Widawski, a Holocaust survivor from the Łódź Ghetto and Auschwitz who dedicated his life to preserving Jewish heritage, has died at 107.
Yehuda Aaron Widawski, a Holocaust survivor who dedicated much of his life to preserving Jewish heritage and passed away at the age of 107, lived through some of the most dramatic chapters of 20th-century Jewish history.
Survival Through the Darkest Hours
Born in Turek, Poland, on July 25, 1919, his family later moved to Łódź. With the establishment of the ghetto in 1940, the family entered it and continued operating a tailor shop, where Jews were employed in forced labor for the Germans. In August 1944, upon the liquidation of the Łódź ghetto, the family was deported to Auschwitz. His parents, Avraham and Dobrish Leah, and his eldest brother, Gabriel, were murdered there. His sister Yocheved was murdered in Stutthof, and another brother, Haim Moshe, was murdered in Buchenwald. Yehuda and his brother Yehoshua survived the selection and were forced into labor. They were later transferred to the Friedland labor camp, a subcamp of Gross-Rosen, where they worked on assembling aircraft wings until their liberation by the Red Army in May 1945.
Rebuilding and Heritage Preservation
After the war, Widawski returned to Łódź, married, and re-established a textile factory. During this period, he also assisted with Irgun weapons shipments from Poland. In 1950, he made Aliyah to Israel and settled in Tel Aviv. Decades later, he returned to Poland with a new mission: to locate his ancestors' graves and preserve the memory of the destroyed Jewish communities. As part of his activities, he participated in the restoration of the Jewish cemetery in Łódź, where over 7,000 gravestones were repaired, and worked to restore the burial sites of Hasidic masters in Poland.
"For me, the very establishment of a family and life in Israel was my answer to the Nazis," Widawski said when he celebrated his 100th birthday in 2019.
In 2012, Widawski was chosen to light a torch at the official state Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Day ceremony at Yad Vashem. Over the years, he continued to participate in memorial events for former residents of Łódź in Israel, connecting the destroyed Jewish world of Poland with the generations built after it in Israel.
