Israel’s oldest Holocaust survivor, who was born in Poland, has died at the age of 107 after spending decades helping preserve thousands of Jewish graves across his native country.

Yehuda Aharon Widawski, the oldest known Holocaust survivor in Israel, died at the age of 107, the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum in southern Poland reported.

He was born on July 26, 1919, in Turek, central Poland, the second of four children.

His family moved to Łódź in 1933. The central Polish city was a major textile-manufacturing hub and home to one of Poland’s largest Jewish communities.

Before the Second World War, Widawski helped run his family’s textile business, which employed dozens of Jewish women to produce shirts and undergarments for the Polish army.

After Nazi Germany occupied Łódź in September 1939, Widawski and his family were forced into the city’s ghetto. 

They continued their textile work and ran one of the ghetto’s first soup kitchens from their home, according to the Auschwitz Memorial, which published an account of Widawski’s life on Facebook. 

In August 1944, as the Nazis liquidated the ghetto, the family was deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau in southern occupied Poland, the largest Nazi concentration and extermination camp complex. 

His parents and eldest brother were murdered in a gas chamber upon arrival. 

Widawski and his younger brother survived and were transferred eight days later to Friedland, a forced-labor camp in what is now Mieroszów in southwestern Poland. 

The brothers were forced to manufacture aircraft wings until the camp was liberated in May 1945. 

They then returned to Łódź, where they learned that the rest of their immediate family had been killed. 

After the war, Widawski established his own textile factory and married. He moved with his family to Israel in 1950 and settled in Tel Aviv.  

He returned to Poland in 1978 to search for his grandmother’s grave at the neglected Jewish cemetery in Łódź. 

That search developed into a decades-long effort to locate and restore Jewish graves across Poland. 

Widawski gained access to municipal archives and helped map burial plots at the Łódź cemetery. 

Over the following decades, he helped identify and mark more than 3,000 graves and participated in the restoration of thousands more, including the burial sites of prominent rabbis.