Yitzhak Arad, who as an orphaned teenage partisan fought the Germans and their collaborators during WWII, then went on to become an esteemed scholar of the Holocaust and the longtime chairman of the Yad Vashem remembrance and research center in Israel, died May 6 in a hospital in Tel Aviv. He was 94.

Mr. Arad was not even bar mitzvahed when the Germans invaded Poland and what is now part of Lithuania in 1939 and began rounding up Jews, forcing them into ghettos and murdering them. His parents and 30 close family members wo8ld perish before the war ended in 1945.

Mr. Arad remained active with Yad Vashem until his last weeks. Last year, he took part in a photography exhibition about Holocaust survivors and their lives after the war. When it was his turn to speak, he confronted the audience with a hard truth born of his own ordeals. “What happened in the past,” he said, “could potentially happen again, to any people, at any time.”