89-Year-Old Holocaust Survivor Celebrates Bar Mitzvah

WILMETTE, IL — More than three quarters of a century ago, Nazis robbed a 12-year-old Harold Katz from a chance to have a normal bar mitzvah, the Jewish coming of age ceremony.

This Memorial Day, Katz filled in that missing memory with his long-delayed celebration at Chabad of Wilmette, marking his bar mitzvah at age 89.

Almost his entire his family was killed in Auschwitz, only Katz and his older brother survived out of nine siblings. Katz immigrated to the United States after the war and married his late wife Judy, a fellow survivor. He became a builder and raised sons and grandsons who all had their own bar mitzvahs and he is eagerly awaiting the birth of his third great-grandchild, according to the Daily North Shore.

Katz commissioned the Torah scroll being used for the ceremony in the traditional way the Jewish scripture has been passed down for thousands of years. It is comprised of more than 300,000 hand-written letters that a scribe in Israel began writing about a year ago, with the final 100 letters completed in Wilmette, Rabbi Moshe Teldon of Chabad told WGN, describing the special occasion as “a celebration of the continuity of Judaism.”

Katz, who now lives in a Chicago retirement home, announced his plans for the long-delayed bar mitzvah and Torah donation at his birthday last year, his daughter told the Tribune. Katz told the paper he has been thinking more about how he wants to be remembered after the deaths of his wife and brother in recent years. He said he would prefer to be remembered as a wonderful story than with some kind of physical memorial.