(JTA) — The world’s oldest man, a New Yorker who attempted to flee Poland after the Nazi invasion in 1939, died at the age of 111.
Alexander Imich held the title of world’s oldest validated man for just two months before his death on Sunday. There are 66 women who were older.
Imich was born in Czestochowa, in southern Poland, to a wealthy secular Jewish family, according to The New York Times. He said he was not allowed to join the Polish Navy due to anti-Semitism.
He and his wife were sent from Bialystok, Poland, where they fled after the Nazis rise to power, to a Soviet labor camp. Returning to Poland after the war, they discovered that many family members had died in the Holocaust. The couple immigrated to Waterbury, Conn., in 1951.
Imich told The New York Times in April that holding the record for world’s oldest man is “not like it’s the Nobel Prize” and that “I never thought I’d be that old.” He said he never drank alcohol. He and his wife, who died in 1986, had no children.
Imich willed his body to the Mount Sinai Medical Center for study.
