On August 11, 2017, the world’s oldest living man passed away, just a month short of his 114th birthday – making him one of the ten longest-lived men since modern record-keeping began. If you knew nothing else about him than this, you would be justified in thinking that he had led a peaceful life, spared of fear, grief, and danger.
The actual truth is the opposite. The man in question was Yisrael Kristal, a Holocaust survivor. Born in Poland in 1903, he survived four years in the Lodz ghetto, and was then transported to Auschwitz. In the ghetto, his two children died. In Auschwitz, his wife Chaje was killed.
When Auschwitz was liberated, he was a walking skeleton weighing a mere 37 kilos. He was the only member of his family to survive.
He was raised as a religious Jew and stayed so all his life. When the war was over and his entire world destroyed, he married another Holocaust survivor, Batsheva. They had children. They made aliya to Haifa. There he began again in the confectionery business, as he had done in Poland before the war. He made sweets and chocolate. He became an innovator.
If you have ever had Israeli orange peel covered in chocolate, or liqueur chocolates shaped like little bottles and covered with silver foil, you have enjoyed one of the products he originated.
Those who knew him said he was a man with no bitterness in his soul. He wanted people to taste sweetness.
In 2016, at the age of 113, he finally celebrated his bar mitzva. A hundred years earlier, this had proved impossible. By then, his mother was dead and his father was fighting in the First World War. On his bar mitzva he joked that he was the world’s oldest tefillin-wearer. He gathered his children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren under his tallit and said, “Here’s one person, and look how many people he brought to life. As we’re all standing here under my tallit, I’m thinking: Six million people. Imagine the world they could have built.”
☛ REFLECT
1. What do you find most inspiring about this story?
2. What do you think was the secret of Yisrael Kristal’s long life?
3. We now live in an age where we have fewer and fewer survivors alive among us to tell their story. How do you think we can continue their legacy?