The family of the world’s oldest man, 113-year-old Yisrael Kristal, a Holocaust survivor living in Israel, have decided they will celebrate with him the bar mitzvah he never had in 1916 due to the disruptions of World War I.
Kristal’s daughter, Shulimat Kristal Kuperstoch, said that about 100 family members would gather in Kristal’s home city of Haifa to “bless him, dance with him, be happy.”
Kristal celebrated his 113rd birthday last week. He was recognized as the world’s oldest man in March.
Kristal was born on Sept. 15, 1903, in the town of Zarnow, Poland. When he turned 13, his mother had been dead for 3 years, and father was serving in the Russian army. In 1920, he moved to Lodz to work in his family’s candy business. He was forced into the Lodz ghetto by the Nazis, where his two children died. In 1944, he was deported to Auschwitz, where his wife was killed.
In 1950, he moved to Haifa with his second wife and their son, working again as a confectioner. Kristal has a son and daughter and many grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
When asked what was his secret for a long life, Kristal said: “I don’t know. 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.”