Yehuda Aharon Widawski, believed to have been Israel’s oldest living Holocaust survivor, was niftar at the age of 107, closing a remarkable life that stretched from prewar Poland through the horrors of the Holocaust and decades devoted to preserving Jewish memory.

Widawski was born in Poland in 1919 and later moved with his family to Łódź. Following the Nazi occupation, the family was confined to the Łódź Ghetto before being deported to Auschwitz in 1944. His parents and several members of his family were murdered during the Holocaust. Widawski and his brother survived and were subsequently sent to the Friedland forced-labor camp before liberation in 1945.

After the war, Widawski rebuilt his life and eventually settled in Israel in 1950.

Decades later, he returned to Poland in search of his grandmother’s grave. That effort grew into a years-long mission to preserve Jewish burial sites and the memory of communities devastated during the Holocaust. Widawski helped identify and mark more than 3,000 Jewish graves and worked extensively on the preservation of the historic Jewish cemetery in Łódź.

His testimony about the Łódź Ghetto, Auschwitz and his experiences during the Holocaust was preserved by Yad Vashem. In 2012, he was selected to light one of the memorial torches at the Holocaust Remembrance Day ceremony.

Widawski leaves behind generations of descendants and a decades-long legacy devoted to ensuring that the kevarim and memories of Polish Jewry would not disappear.