Kids & Family

Video: Man Celebrates Bar Mitzvah 75 Years Later

Young boy initiates delayed Bar Mitzvah for Holocaust survivor Mitchell Winthrop at Illinois Holocaust Museum.

While describing his experiences as a victim of the Holocaust with students of a Jewish school visiting the Illinois Holocaust Museum in Skokie, Mitchell Winthrop was granted something that should have come 75 years ago. His Bar Mitzvah.

Winthrop explained to the students of Cheder Lubavitch Jewish School how he was about to turn 13 when the Nazis invaded his native Poland in 1939, according to CBS-2-Chicago. He and his mother were separated at Auschwitz and his father starved to death.

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When he mentioned to the kids he never had a bar mitzvah, one boy suggested that could still be done, and why not right now.

“So the child guided him through Hebrew prayers he hadn’t recited since childhood,” according to CBS.

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“I remembered them from 75 years ago,”said Winthrop. “It was incredible.”

With a picture of his murdered family beside him, Winthrop said it was as though they were finally celebrating with him.

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