The world’s oldest man is set to finally hold his bar mitzvah party, a century after his original celebration was disrupted by the First World War.
Israel Kristal from Zarnow, Poland, turned 13 during the war and was unable to celebrate the coming-of-age milestone after his homeland was thrown into conflict.
Now 113, Mr Kristal’s children are giving him the party he never had as a teenager.
Mr Kristal spent time in the Auschwitz death camp during the Second World War due to his Jewish heritage, where his first wife and two children were killed.
According to records, Mr Kristal was starved and weighed just 37kg when the camp was liberated by Allied forces in January 1945 and he was freed.
In 1950, he emigrated to Haifa, Israel, with his second wife and their son, where he continued working at his confectionery business until his retirement.
“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,” Mr Kristal said in March after being declared the world’s oldest living man by the Guinness Book of Records.
"There have been smarter, stronger and better looking men then 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.”
Mr Kristal’s daughter Schulamit said more than 100 family members and friends will be invited to her father’s party.
“When my father was 13 years old, it was the First World War. His father was in the Russian army, his mother had died three years before. No one was celebrating in this moment,” she told DPA.
“We will bless him, we will dance with him, we’ll be happy with him… [but] you can’t feel like you’re 13 when you’re 113.”
The world's previous oldest man, Yasutaro Koide of Japan, died in January 2016 at the age of 112 years, 312 days, two months short of his 113th birthday.
Susannah Mushatt Jones is the oldest living person and oldest living woman at 115 years and 249 days. When asked her secret to living for so long, she said she eats bacon every day.
