The world's oldest man. On the 11th of August 2017, the world's oldest man passed away just a month short of his 114th birthday, making him one of the 10 longest-lived men since modern record keeping began. If you knew nothing else about him than this, you'd be justified in thinking that he'd led a peaceful life,

spared of fear, grief and danger. The actual truth is the opposite. The man in question was

Yisrael Christal, Holocaust survivor. Born in Poland in 1903, he survived four years in the

lodge ghetto and was then transported to Auschwitz.

In the ghetto, his two children died.

In Auschwitz, his wife was killed.

When Auschwitz was liberated, he was a walking skeleton, weighing a mere 37 kilos.

He was the only member of his family to survive.

He was raised as a religious Jew and stayed so all his life. When the war was over and his entire world destroyed his, he married again

this time to another Holocaust survivor. They had children. They made Alia Tahrifer. There he began

again in the confectionery business as he had done in Poland before the war.

He made sweets and chocolate.

He became an innovator.

If you've ever had Israeli orange peel covered in chocolate or liqueur chocolates, shaped like little bottles and covered with silver foil, you're enjoying one of the projects he originated. Those who

knew him said he was a man with no bitterness in his soul. He wanted people to taste sweetness.

In 2016, at the age of 113, he finally celebrated his bimitzvah. A hundred years earlier, this had proved impossible.

By then, his mother was dead and his father was fighting in the First World War.

With an almost poetic sense of fittingness,

Israel died on Arab Shabas Parishas Akhav,

the parasha that includes the second paragraph of the Shama with its commands to wear,

Tifilin, and teach Torah to your children,

Laman Yirbuya Mebana'em Ehm, so that you and your children may live long in the land that the Lord swore to your ancestors.

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