Yisrael Kristal

Yisrael Kristal or Israel Kristal; (born Izrael Icek Kryształ ; Hebrew: קרישטל ישראל, 15 September 1903 – 11 August 2017) was a Polish-Israeli confectioner, Holocaust survivor, and supercentenarian. In 2014, he was recognized as the oldest known living Holocaust survivor. Following the death of Yasutaro Koide on 18 January 2016, Kristal was recognized as the world's oldest living man. Born in Maleniec, Congress Poland, he survived the Łódź Ghetto and Auschwitz concentration camp during the Holocaust, and emigrated to Israel in 1950.

Early life

Kristal was born to a religious Jewish family in Maleniec, Końskie County, near Żarnów, then part of Congress Poland of the Russian Empire, on 15 September 1903. 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.

His mother died in 1913 when he was ten years old. After World War I broke out in 1914, he saw Kaiser Franz Joseph in person when the monarch rode through his town in a car, and recalled sweets being thrown as he passed. His father was drafted into the Imperial Russian Army, was taken prisoner and died soon after the war. Meanwhile, Kristal moved in with his uncles.

In 1920, at age 17, he moved to Łódź. After briefly laboring as a metalworker, he opened a candy store with an uncle. While initially working as a physical laborer, he later became a renowned expert candy-maker. He married Chaja Feige Frucht in 1928, and they had two children.

Holocaust survival In 1940, after the Germans 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 Łódź ghetto, among them Judenrat head, Chaim Rumkowski. His two children, from his first marriage, died during this time in the ghetto, while Kristal and his wife were subsequently deported to Auschwitz concentration camp in August 1944.

Kristal's wife was murdered in Auschwitz; he worked as a forced laborer and survived. When the camp was liberated by the Red Army, Kristal weighed . Kristal died at his home in Haifa on 11 August 2017, at age 113 years, 10 months.

Oldest living man

Following the death of 110-year-old Alice Herz-Sommer in London on 23 February 2014, Kristal became recognized as the world's oldest known Holocaust survivor (though he was actually a few months older than she was).