The World’s Oldest Man Is An Israeli Who Survived The Nazi Death Camp Auschwitz

"My father is someone who is always happy."

Yochanan Visser
March 15, 2016

Guinness-World-Records-announces-new-Oldest-man-Israel-Kristal_tcm25-420328

The U.S.-based Gerontology Research Group (GRG) confirmed last week that the world’s oldest man is an Israeli Holocaust survivor.

Yisrael Kristal, 112, is living in the Israeli port-city Haifa and was handed a certificate by Margo Frigatti the head of Guinness World Records.

The Israeli media first wrote about Kristal in January when GRG contacted his grandson after the death of Japanese citizen Yasutaro Koide who passed away after reaching the same age. But now it’s official: the world’s oldest man is an Auschwitz survivor.

Yisrael Kristal was born to a religious family on September 15, 1903, near the town of Zarnow in Poland. He studied Tanach (Hebrew Bible) and Mishnah (Oral Torah) at the local Heder, a religious primary school. He dropped out of school at the beginning of World War I when his father was forced to serve in the Red Army. Yisrael later established a successful candy factory in the city of Lodz that continued operating during the first period of the Nazi occupation.

Kristal was forced by the Nazis to move to the Lodz Ghetto where his two children died. He and his wife were later sent to Auschwitz where Yisrael survived by working in labor camps. Chaja Feige Frucht, his wife, was murdered in Auschwitz by the Germans. After two long years of backbreaking slave labour, Yisrael was saved from the brink of death by Allied forces in May 1945. He weighed only 81 pounds when he was rescued.

After the war, Yisrael originally planned to stay in Poland where he reestablished his candy factory and remarried in 1947, but in 1950, he decided to move to Israel where he settled in Haifa and opened a candy store.

His daughter Shula was born in Israel and told reporters her father has remained religious all his life and believes his extreme longevity is a present from God who bestowed grace upon him.

Shula said the Holocaust did not affect her father’s beliefs. “He believes he was saved because that’s what God wanted. He is not an angry person; he is not someone who seeks accounting. He believes everything has a reason in the world.”

“My father is someone who is always happy. He is optimistic, wise, and values what he has. His attitude to life is: “Everything in moderation,” Shula told Israeli media while adding, “He eats and sleeps moderately, and says a person should always be in control of his own life and not have his life control him, as far as this is possible.”

“My father says that if he had created some medicine to extend life then it should be something notable. But his attitude is that he has just lived his life and reached this age, it’s just his reality, it wasn’t in his hands. That’s what he believes,” the daughter concluded.

The now oldest man in the world “has continuously and rigorously been performing the commandment of phylacteries (tefillin) every morning for the last century, with the exception of the Holocaust and both world wars,” Guinness wrote on its website.

The Tefillin contain verses taken from the Bible and are worn by religious and non-religious Jewish men on each day of the week except for Shabbat. One of these Bible verses is taken from the book of D’varim (Deuteronomy) and states the following:

“That thou mightest fear HaShem thy God, to keep all His statutes and His commandments, which I command thee, thou, and thy son, and thy son’s son, all the days of thy life; and that thy days may be prolonged.” (Deuteronomy 6:4-9)

Tags:
Israel, Uplifting



http://www.westernjournalism.com/the-worlds-oldest-man-is-an-israeli-who-survived-the-nazi-death-camp-auschwitz/

The man has lived more history,
than most have even read.

The stories, the wealth of knowledge...
I hope his family does well, to preserve that.