Holocaust survivor and scholar Yehuda Bauer passed away October 18. He was 98. He was buried at Shoval kibbutz in the Negev.

Lithuanian Jewish Community chairwoman Faina Kukliansky, the entire Community and the World Jewish Congress mourn the passing of Yehuda Bauer and extend our deepest condolences to his family members and all who knew him.

WJC president Ronald Lauder said: “I was deeply saddened to hear about the passing of Prof. Yehuda Bauer, who taught generations of students and others about the Holocaust. I will never forget our last discussions at the International Forum on Holocaust Remembrance and Combating Antisemitism in Malmö, Sweden, in October 2021 and the passionate speech he gave on that occasion.”

On that occasion, Bauer addressed the audience and characterized anti-Semitism as “an extreme case of a general human disease. [It] is not a Jewish illness, though the Jews are the obvious first victims. Anti-Semitism is a cancer in the body politic of the world’s societies.”

WJC’s Israel pepresentative Laurence Weinbaum described Bauer as “the doyen of Holocaust scholarship and as a man of peerless intellect, whose commitment to chronicling contemporary history, however excruciating, was relentless. Yehuda began his quest at a time when the Holocaust was still a festering wound and few scholars were writing about it. A mesmerizing, iconoclastic lecturer and a meticulous researcher, Yehuda’s brilliance stood in inverse proportion to his ego. Those privileged to have known him will never forget his kindness, compassion and self-effacing wit. May his memory be a blessing and an unremitting source of inspiration.”