Yahoo – AFP,
August 11, 2017
Jerusalem
(AFP) - Israeli Holocaust survivor Yisrael Kristal, certified last year by
Guinness World Records as the world's oldest man, died on Friday aged 113,
Israeli media reported.
Since he
was an observant Jew, his family could not be reached on Friday evening, the
onset of the Jewish sabbath.
"Yisrael
Kristal... died on Friday a month before his 114th birthday," Haaretz
daily reported in its online edition.
News site
Ynet said he was survived by two children, 9 grandchildren and 32
great-grandchildren.
The World
Jewish Congress noted his passing in a brief Twitter statement.
"Holocaust
survivor Yisrael Kristal was the oldest man in the world. Yisrael passed away
today. May his memory be a blessing."
Kristal,
originally from Zarnow in what is now Poland, was born on September 15, 1903 --
three months before the Wright brothers' first successful powered airplane
flight.
Guinness
World Records recognised him as the world's oldest man in March 2016.
In
September he celebrated his Bar Mitzvah after a century-long delay.
Usually
marked at 13 for boys and 12 or 13 for girls -- a Bat Mitzvah in that case --
it marks the transition into someone responsible for his or her actions.
Yisrael Kristal pictured on January 22, 2016 at his home in the Israeli
city of Haifa (AFP Photo/SHULA KOPERSHTOUK)
|
Kristal was
unable to celebrate his Bar Mitzvah in 1916 because his mother had died three
months earlier and his father was a soldier in the Russian army at the time of
World War I.
"My
father is religious and has prayed every morning for 100 years, but he has
never had his Bar Mitzvah," his daughter Shula Koperstoch told AFP last
year.
After World
War I, Kristal moved to Lodz where he worked in the family confectionary
factory, married and had two children.
But his
life was disrupted when the Jewish quarter of the city became a ghetto under
Nazi occupation during World War II and Kristal was sent to the infamous Nazi
death camp Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Around 1.1
million people, most of them European Jews, perished in the camp between 1940
and 1945 before it was liberated by Soviet forces.
His wife
and two children died but Kristal survived, weighing just 37 kilos (81 pounds)
at the end of the war.
He then
moved to Israel, where he opened a sweet shop.
Guinness
World Records' website said that on receiving his certificate at his home in
the northern Israeli city of Haifa last year Kristal offered no explanation for
his longevity.
"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," he said.
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