99-Year-Old Australian Marks Bar Mitzvah
A 99-year-old man living in Australia celebrated his bar mitzvah.
Isaac Volinsky joined a group of about 40 Jews from the former Soviet Union at a Chabad house near Sydney’s Bondi Beach for the first time last week.
When Rabbi Eli Schlanger discovered that Volinsky had never been to the weekly “120 Club” for elderly expat Soviets before, he asked if he would like to put on tefillin.
Schlanger said Volinsky told him he never had a bar mitzvah in his native Odessa. “It was an amazing scene,”
Schlanger said. “The first time a Jewish boy puts on tefillin is regarded as his bar mitzvah and all the club members treated it as a simcha. They were all standing and singing ‘mazel tov’.”
Schlanger, who speaks Yiddish and “enough Russian for the elderly to smile,” said Volinsky was “absolutely mobile and lucid.” Volinsky, a former colonel in the Russian army, will celebrate his centenary in six months.
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning journalism this Passover.
In this age of misinformation, our work is needed like never before. We report on the news that matters most to American Jews, driven by truth, not ideology.
At a time when newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall. That means for the first time in our 126-year history, Forward journalism is free to everyone, everywhere. With an ongoing war, rising antisemitism, and a flood of disinformation that may affect the upcoming election, we believe that free and open access to Jewish journalism is imperative.
Readers like you make it all possible. Right now, we’re in the middle of our Passover Pledge Drive and we still need 300 people to step up and make a gift to sustain our trustworthy, independent journalism.
Make a gift of any size and become a Forward member today. You’ll support our mission to tell the American Jewish story fully and fairly.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
Only 300 more gifts needed by April 30