Rabbi Yehuda Aharon Videvsky, the oldest Holocaust survivor living in Israel, passed away during Rosh Hashanah at the age of 107.
Widewski, who dedicated his adult years to restoring and exposing destroyed Jewish cemeteries in Poland, left behind a rich legacy of memory and commemoration.
His main life's work after the Holocaust began in 1978, when he traveled to Poland with the goal of locating the grave of his grandmother Hinda Ordnance in the neglected cemetery in Lodz.
The dismal state of the cemetery in Lodz led him to contact the local municipality, gain access to the archives, and begin the task of mapping the burial plots, where about 50,000 Jews from the ghetto period and about 200,000 throughout history were buried.
Thanks to his activities, tombstones were located and erected for more than 3,000 graves.
In the town of Suczew, he discovered the resting place of the Hasidic Rebbes - the "Avnei Nezr" and "Shem Mesmuel", Rabbi Avraham Bornstein and Rabbi Shmuel Bornstein zt"l - and erected an "Ohel" above the Zions. He also worked to restore the "Ohel" of the first Rebbe of Modzic Hasidic, Rabbi Israel Taub zt"l.
Over the years, it has become a central address for grave seekers and property locators, and for this work, in 2012, it was chosen to light a torch at Yad Vashem.
The deceased, Z"L, was born in 1919 in the town of Turk, near the city of Lodz. His father, Avraham, was a merchant and his mother, Dabrish-Leah, ran the household. As a child, he was educated in a "chapel." The family later moved to the city of Lodz, and in 1933 he took on the management of the family textile business.
In 1939, he foresaw the expected decrees from the Nazis and arranged in advance for his family of 15 to live in an apartment in the Lodz ghetto, to which Yehuda smuggled a large amount of property. The family remained there until the end of August 1944, when they were sent on the last train to the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp.
His parents and his older brother Gabriel, a student at the Chachmei Yeshiva of Lublin, were murdered in the crematoria, his younger brother Chaim Moshe perished in Buchenwald, and his sister Yocheved was murdered in the Stutthof camp in Poland.
Only he and his brother Yehoshua remained alive after Mengele's selection.
From Auschwitz they were transferred to the Friedland camp, where they worked in a factory manufacturing aircraft wings. He was later appointed to coordinate the work group. When the prisoners were required to increase their daily production output, he devised a method in which two stolen wings were hidden, which served as backup on days when they did not meet the quota.
The two were liberated by the Red Army on May 9, 1945.
At the end of the war, he returned to Lodz, married Dabrysh, a native of Waserzog, who also survived, and their son Abraham was born there.
In 1950, the family immigrated to Israel, settled in Tel Aviv, and their daughter Leah was born.
President of the State Isaac Herzog paid tribute: "I was saddened to hear of the passing of the late Yehuda Aharon Videvsky, a survivor of Auschwitz and the Nazi camps, at the age of 107.
When he was 104 years old, I had the privilege of hosting Yehuda at the President's House with his magnificent family. I was thrilled to hear from him about his life story and his choice to return to Poland years after immigrating to Israel to search for his grandmother's grave.
This search became a life's work - for decades, Yehuda worked to locate and restore Jewish cemeteries and graves in Poland, and helped identify more than 3,000 graves. Yehuda once said that his revenge on the Nazis was that they lost - and we have the State of Israel. May Yehuda's memory be blessed.".
