World’s Oldest Man, Yisrael Kristal, 113, To Hold Bar Mitzvah

Yisrael Kristal, who lives in Israel, will celebrate the Jewish coming-of-age ceremony with family and friends in a synagogue in Haifa, his daughter said. His daughter, Shulimath Kristal Kuperstoch, told the DTA news agency that his family is planning a bar mitzvah for him, and about 100 relatives will attend.

Mr Kristal was recognised as the world’s oldest man in March.

Yisrael was supposed to celebrate his Bar Mitzvah in 1916 but this was rendered impossible when the battles of World War I reached his doorstep in Poland.

Yisrael Kristal, who at age 113 is recognized by Guinness World Records as the oldest man in the world, was unable to celebrate the Jewish rite of passage when he was 13 because his mother had recently died and his father was in the Russian army fighting in World War I.

The family said the celebration will be held late this month, but the family is keeping mum on the location fearing a throng of journalists.

Bar Mitzvahs are celebrated when a young boy turns 13 years old..

He endured more torment about a decade later, when his family was forced out of their candy business in Lodz by the Nazis into a Polish ghetto, where two of his children died.

Later as an adult, Kristal’s homeland was again thrown into another world war, invaded by Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany. In 1944, he was deported to Auschwitz, where his wife, whom he had married at 25, was killed. He lost his first wife and their two children in the Holocaust and later moved to Israel. When the Allied forces liberated Auschwitz, Kristal weighed just 37 kilos (81.6 pounds), according to the Guinness World Records. ‘We will bless him, we will dance with him, we will be happy, ‘ she said.

Now the world’s oldest man is set to finally have his coming of age bar mitzvah.

Kristal was quoted as saying: “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.

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‘All that is left for us to do is to keep on working as hard as we can and rebuild what is lost’.