Jewish Man Will Celebrate Bar Mitzvah 100 Years Late

Yisreal Kristal became a man long ago, but when he turns 113 in two weeks, he'll formally observe it by celebrating his bar mitzvah.

The Jewish coming of age ceremony is usually celebrated when a young man turns 13, but 100 years ago when Kristal reached the Jewish age of manhood, World War I just began and there was no one to preside over his ceremony.

"We are excited, we're happy, it is a great honor to celebrate his bar mitzvah," daughter Shula Kuperstoch told the BBC about the event, which will happen in two weeks. "He has children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren and cousins and everyone is coming."

She added it would be a "corrective experience" for her father, who was officially recognized by Guinness World Records as the world's oldest man in March.

In his 112 years Kristal has lived through some of the harshest experiences of the 20th Century, starting with watching his father join the Russian army during the First World War. He was living in Poland in 1939, when Germany invaded to start the World War II. He and his family were forced into the ghetto in Lodz, where his two children died. Later, he and his wife were shipped to Auschwitz, where she died.

Kristal survived and later emigrated to Israel in 1950.