Holocaust survivor confirmed as world's oldest man

A 112-year-old Israeli Holocaust survivor who lived through both world wars is now the world's oldest living man, the Guinness World Records said on Friday.

Yisrael Kristal was born into an Orthodox Jewish family living near Lodz in modern-day Poland, then part of the Russian empire, on September 15, 1903, three months before the Wright brothers took the first aeroplane flight.

Kristal never had a bar mitzvah, the traditional Jewish ceremony when a boy turns 13, after being separated from his parents during the First World War.

After the war he worked for the family's confectionary factory until the invasion of Poland by Nazi Germany in 1939 that triggered the Second World War.

He and his wife and two children subsequently lived in the Jewish ghetto in Lodz until they were sent to the Auschwitz death camp in 1943 where the rest of the family died.

Kristal survived, weighing just 37 kilos at the end of the war.

Guinness confirmed on Friday he was now considered the world's oldest living man.

"Mr Kristal’s achievement is remarkable - he can teach us all an important lesson about the value of life and how to stretch the limits of human longevity," Marco Frigatti, head of records for Guinness, said.

Reacting to the news, Kristal said in a statement, "I don’t know the secret for long life. I believe that everything is determined from above and we shall never know the reasons why. There have been smarter, stronger and better-looking men than me who are no longer alive."

Kristal remarried after the Second World War and in 1950 moved to Haifa with his second wife and their son, where he continued to make sweets until his retirement.

The oldest living woman, at 116 years old, is Susannah Mushatt Jones, of the United States, who was born on 6 July 1899.

Last year Middle East Eye ran a story about Rajab al-Tom, a Palestinian man in Gaza, who the Palestinian enclave's ministry of health said was 127 years old. MEE was unable to verify his claim.