Israel’s oldest Holocaust survivor dies
Yehuda Aharon Vidavsky, Israel’s oldest man to have survived the Holocaust, has died at the age of 107. He survived imprisonment in the Łódź Ghetto and the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp and, after the war, devoted decades to restoring Jewish cemeteries in Poland, The Jerusalem Post reports.
Imprisonment and liberation
Vidavsky was born in Poland in 1919. After the Nazi invasion, he and his family were imprisoned in the Łódź Ghetto and later deported to Auschwitz. There, he lost his parents and most of his brothers and sisters.
Together with his brother Yehoshua, Vidavsky survived a selection conducted by Josef Mengele. Eight days later, the brothers were sent to the Friedland labor camp, and in 1945 they were liberated by the Red Army.
After the war, Vidavsky helped the Irgun organization purchase weapons in Europe. In 1950, he moved to Israel, where he built a large family and lived to see the fifth generation of his descendants.
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Preserving memory
From the late 1970s, Vidavsky repeatedly traveled to Poland, where he searched for and restored dozens of neglected and desecrated Jewish cemeteries and mass burial sites. He also worked to preserve historic tombstones.
In 2012, Vidavsky was chosen to light a torch at the state Holocaust Remembrance Day ceremony at Yad Vashem, in recognition of his work to preserve historical memory. He was one of the leading witnesses at ceremonies of Jews of Polish origin and one of the oldest members of the Sochatchov and Modzitz Hasidic communities.
Israeli President Isaac Herzog wrote in a post on X that Vidavsky spent decades searching for and restoring Jewish cemeteries and graves in Poland and helped identify more than 3,000 burial sites. According to Herzog, the search for Vidavsky’s grandmother’s grave became the work of his life.
