Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Breaking News

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.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse..

Readers like you make it all possible. Support our work by becoming a Forward Member and connect with our journalism and your community.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.