Israel’s Oldest Holocaust Survivor Passes Away at 107

“My revenge against the Nazis is that they lost, and we have the State of Israel,” Vidovsky said.

By United with Israel Staff

Yehuda Aharon Vidovsky, believed to be the oldest Holocaust survivor living in Israel, passed away on the eve of Rosh Hashana at the age of 107, leaving behind a remarkable legacy of survival, faith and rebuilding Jewish life.

Vidovsky survived the Lodz Ghetto and Auschwitz, where much of his family was murdered by the Nazis, before rebuilding his life and eventually immigrating to Israel.

Born in Turek, Poland, Vidovsky moved with his family to Lodz as a teenager. After the Nazis established the Lodz Ghetto, his family was forced into the ghetto, where they operated a sewing workshop employing dozens of Jews in forced labor.

During the liquidation of the ghetto in August 1944, Vidovsky and his family were deported to Auschwitz. His parents, Avraham and Dovrish Leah, and his older brother Gabriel were murdered there shortly afterward. His sister Yocheved was killed at Stutthof, while another brother, Chaim Moshe, was murdered at Buchenwald.

Vidovsky and his brother Yehoshua survived a selection by notorious Nazi doctor Josef Mengele and were eventually transferred to the Friedland labor camp, a subcamp of Gross-Rosen, where they were forced to assemble aircraft wings.

The brothers survived until their liberation by the Soviet Army in May 1945.

Following the war, Vidovsky returned to Lodz, married Dobrish Wasserzug and rebuilt his family’s textile business. During his years in Poland, he also assisted the Irgun in shipping weapons from Poland.

Vidovsky immigrated to Israel in 1950 and settled in Tel Aviv, where he built a large family and became a businessman. A Hasid associated with the Sochatchov and Modzitz communities, he remained deeply committed to Jewish life and tradition.

Beginning in the 1970s, Vidovsky also dedicated himself to preserving Jewish history in the country where so much of his own family had been murdered. Over the decades, he worked to restore Jewish cemeteries and tens of thousands of graves across Poland.

In a 2019 interview with Ynet, Vidovsky described the Jewish people’s survival and the establishment of Israel as his ultimate answer to the Nazis.

“My revenge against the Nazis is that they lost, and we have the State of Israel,” he said. “We are free and strong, and no one will ever be able to destroy us again.”

His personal victory was also embodied by the family he built after the Holocaust. At the time of the interview, Vidovsky had two children, six grandchildren and 16 great-grandchildren, most of whom lived near one another and continued the Jewish traditions he had preserved through some of the darkest years of Jewish history.

Vidovsky passed away as Jews in Israel and around the world prepared to welcome Rosh Hashana, more than eight decades after he survived the Nazi attempt to destroy European Jewry.