“L’chaim” will take on a whole new meaning for the world’s oldest man.
Yisrael Kristal is celebrating his 113th birthday by finally having a bar mitzvah — 100 years later than he originally planned.
“We will bless him, we will dance with him, we will be happy,” his daughter, Shulimath Kristal Kuperstoch, told the DPA news agency.
About 100 of Kristal’s family members are going to Israel to help him celebrate his historic birthday.
He’ll take part in the Jewish rite of passage, which should have happened a century earlier.
But in 1916, when Kristal was supposed to become a man, World War I was ravaging his Polish homeland.
Two decades later, he was running a candy business with his family in Lodz when the Nazis invaded, booting him out of the city and into a Jewish ghetto.
Two of his children later died there. But Kristal and his wife, whom he married when he was 25, endured, only to be shipped off to Auschwitz in 1944.
His wife was one of the 1.1 million Jews killed at the concentration camp.
But Kristal once again managed to survive, and moved to the Israeli port city of Haifa in 1950 with his second wife and their son.
While Kristal has experienced more than his share of hardships, he has had plenty of cause for celebration recently.
In March, he became the world’s oldest man when Japan’s Yasutaro Koide died.
It took Guinness officials a while to confirm Kristal’s status as the oldest man alive because he had very few of the documents needed for verification.
He had originally presented them with his marriage license, but that wasn’t good enough.
But a document located in the Polish archives did the trick, proving he was a resident of Lodz in 1918 and that he was 15 at the time.
Kristal said he has no secrets for longevity or for overcoming adversity.
“I believe that everything is determined from above and we shall never know the reasons why,” he said, according to the Times of Israel. “There have been smarter, stronger and better-looking men than me who are no longer alive.
“All that is left for us to do is to keep working as hard as we can and rebuild what is lost.”