World’s oldest man finally has bar mitzvah
The world’s oldest man, 113-year-old Yisrael Kristal, a Holocaust survivor living in Israel, has celebrated his bar mitzvah a century late.
The world’s oldest man, 113-year-old Yisrael Kristal, a Holocaust survivor living in Israel, has celebrated his bar mitzvah a century late.
Kristal, of Haifa, celebrated the rite on the weekend of Rosh Hashanah with his two children, grandchildren and nearly 30 -great-grandchildren.
He was recognised as the world’s oldest man in March.
He missed his bar mitzvah at 13 due to World War I. His father was in the Russian army and his mother had died three years earlier.
His daughter, Shulamith Kuperstoch, told the Associated Press last week that Kristal was “very pleased” as he recited the Shehecheyanu prayer of gratitude as a prayer shawl was draped around his shoulders while surrounded by his family.
“Everyone sang and danced around him. He was very happy,” she said. “It was always his dream to have a bar mitzvah and he really appreciated the moment.”
Born on September 15, 1903, in the town of Zarnow, Poland, Kristal moved to Lodz in 1920 to work in his family’s candy business. He continued operating the business after the Nazis forced the city’s Jews into a ghetto, where Kristal’s two children died.
In 1944, he was deported to Auschwitz, where his wife, whom he had married at 25, was killed.
In 1950, he moved to Haifa with his second wife and their son, working again as a confectioner.
Kuperstoch told The Jerusalem Post in January that her father has been religiously observant his whole life and continues to lay tefillin each morning.
“The Holocaust did not affect his beliefs,” Kuperstoch said. “He believes he was saved because that’s what God wanted. He is not an angry person, he is not someone who seeks to an accounting, he believes everything has a reason in the world.”
“His attitude to life is everything in moderation,” she added. “He eats and sleeps moderately, and says that a person should always be in control of their own life and not have their life control them, as far as this is possible.”
Presenting Kristal with a certificate recognising his title as world’s oldest man in March, Guinness World Records’ head of global records Marco Frigatti said, “Mr Kristal’s achievement is remarkable – he can teach us all an important lesson about the value of life and how to stretch the limits of human longevity.”
When asked at the time he was certified as the oldest living man what his secret was to long life, Kristal said: “I don’t know the secret for long life. I believe that everything is determined from above and we shall never know the reasons why. There have been smarter, stronger and better-looking men than me who are no longer alive. All that is left for us to do is to keep on working as hard as we can and rebuild what is lost.”
JTA
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