World’s oldest man dies aged 113
The world’s oldest man, who was an Auschwitz survivor, has died a month before his 114th birthday.
Israel Kristal, who was born in Poland in 1903, was the only member of his Orthodox Jewish family to survive World War II.
His grandson Oren Kristal said: “He managed to accomplish a lot. Every year he lived was like a few years for somebody else.”
I srael was sent to Auschwi tz and other concentration camps after the Nazis occupied Poland.
His first wife and their two children were killed in the Holocaust.
Israel, who weighed less than six stone at the end of the war, married another Holocaust survivor.
They moved to Israel in 1950, where he opened a successful confectionary business.
Oren said: “He was a very hard-working man. He had a lot of energy, a lways running from one place to another doing something,”
He added his grandad, who died on Friday, still participated in the bar mitzvah – the Jewish coming- of- age ceremony when a boy turns 13 – of one of his grandsons just a few weeks ago.
Israel missed his own bar mitzvah because of the outbreak of World War I but finally celebrated it when he turned 113 last September.
He was awa rded a certif icate by Guinness World Records last year recognising him as the world’s oldest man.