© Shula Kopershtouk
Yisrael Kristal, a Holocaust survivor who was recognized by the Guinness Book of World Records to be the world's oldest man and one of the ten oldest men who ever lived, passed away today in his home in Haifa. He was one month shy of his 114th birthday.
He was born in Maleniec, Poland, on September 15, 1903. His father was a Torah scholar, and Yisrael was sent to the
Cheder when he was three, to follow in his father's footsteps. Life had other plans: His mother died in 1910, and in 1914, when Yisrael was 11, World War I broke out. When Kaiser Franz Joseph drove through the streets of his town in a car, throwing sweets and waving at the children, Kristal was there to wave back. His father, however, was soon recruited by the army and died in the war.
Moving to Lodz when he was 17, Kristal found work in a candy factory, and soon proved himself as an expert candy-maker. He married Chaja Feige Frucht in 1928, and had two daughters. He continued to manufacture candy, sometime secretly, even after the Nazis took over and forced all of Lodz's Jews into the ghetto. Both of his children perished there. In 1944, when the ghetto was liquidated, Kristal and his wife were both deported to Auschwitz. Chaja Feige died shortly thereafter, but Yisrael survived, working as a forced laborer.
When the Red Army liberated him, he thanked the Soviet soldiers by making them candy. He returned to Lodz, rebuilt his old candy shop, and met another woman, Batsheva, who he married in 1947. The couple had a son, Chaim, and a daughter, Shula.
Comment: More on the misdeeds of this tech behemoth: