Yisrael Kristal

Yisrael Kristal (born 15 September 1903), aged 7009354672000000000♠112 years, 142 days, is a retired Polish-born Israeli candy maker and Holocaust survivor with a claim to be the the oldest man alive.

Early life

Kristal was born to a religious Jewish family in Żarnów, Poland, then part of the Russian Empire. His father was a Torah scholar who ensured his son had a religious education, and Kristal would remain religiously observant all his life. He attended a cheder at age three, where he studied Judaism and Hebrew. He learned the Hebrew Bible at four and the Mishnah at six. In a 2012 interview, he recalled his father waking him at five in the morning to begin his religious instruction.^[1] His mother died in 1910. When World War I broke out in in 1914, he saw Kaiser Franz Joseph in person when the monarch rode through his town in a car, and recalled throwing sweets at him with other children as he passed. His father was drafted into the Imperial Russian Army and died soon after.^[2]

In 1920, at age 17, he moved to Łódź. After briefly laboring as a metalworker, he found a job in the family's candy factory. While initially working as a physical laborer, he later became a renowned expert candy-maker. He married in 1928, and had two children.^[2][3]

Holocaust survival

In 1940, after the Nazis had taken over Poland during World War II, Kristal continued to manufacture candy, at times secretly and at other times, with the encouragement of the heads of the ghetto, among them head of the Judenrat Chaim Rumkowski. His two children died in the ghetto, while Kristal and his wife were deported to Auschwitz concentration camp during the liquidation of the ghetto in August 1944. Kristal's wife died in Auschwitz while he worked as a forced laborer and survived. After the camp was liberated by the Red Army, he was taken to hospital, where he returned to his profession and made candies for Soviet soldiers, before returning to Łódź, where he rebuilt his destroyed candy shop and met his second wife, Batsheva. They married in 1947. The couple had a son, Chaim.^[2]

Life in Israel

In 1950, the family immigrated to Israel on the ship Komemiyut and settled in Haifa, where the couple had a daughter, Shula. He initially worked at the Palata candy factory, where he was considered an expert and taught the owners to make an entire production line of sweets. He then became self-employed, making boutique sweets at home and selling them at a Haifa kiosk. Among the sweets he produced were tiny liquor bottles made of chocolate wrapped in colored foil, jam made from carob, and chocolate-covered orange peels. In 1952, began manufacturing his candies at the Sar and Kristal Factory on Shivat Zion Street. After the factory closed in 1970, he returned to making his candies at home before retiring.^[2]

Kristal is still religiously observant, and has nine grandchildren. He also has great-grandchildren, but his family prefers not to state his exact number of descendants for fear of the "evil eye". After the death Alice Herz-Sommer in London in 2014, Kristal became the world's oldest Holocaust survivor.^[4][1] He is believed to have become the world's oldest man after the death of Japanese supercentenarian Yasutaro Koide on January 19, 2016.

Claim to be the world's oldest man

Kristal is currently a candidate for recognition as the world's oldest man by the Guinness World Records. However, the main stumbling block is the fact that Guinness regulations currently stipulate that to be officially recognized as the world's oldest man, he must provide documentation from the first 20 years of his life: the earliest documentation that has so far surfaced and been verified is his 1928 marriage certificate, from when he was 25.^[5]

References