Brit milah (circumcision) ceremony (illustration)
Brit milah (circumcision) ceremony (illustration)Flash 90

A 96-year-old man was circumcised in Canada by Chabad, with the organization describing him as the “oldest man since Abraham” to undergo the age-old Jewish ritual of the brit milah.

The elderly man, Armin Konn, grew up in Ukraine in a Jewish family but his parents were afraid to have him circumcised due to the anti-Jewish ideology of the ruling communists at the time, the Jewish Chronicle reported.

He is now considered the oldest man to be circumcised since Abraham, who was commanded by G-d to be circumcised at the age of 99 around 3,700 years ago.

According to the Jewish Russian Community Center of Ontario in Toronto, Konn was born in Zhvil, Ukraine in 1926 at a time when the communist rulers were attempting to suppress the Jewish religion. He recalled that his parents were scared to have him circumcised over safety concerns.

During World War II, he enlisted in the Red ARmy’s Air Force but was shot down over Lithuania and survived the rest of the war in a German POW camp. After the war ended, he moved to Canada.

After becoming closer to the Toronto Jewish community in recent years, Konn began speaking to rabbis and doctors about the procedure and decided he wanted to be circumcised.

He was circumcised on Thursday at Chabad’s Jewish Russian Community Center of Ontario along with the new son of its Rabbi Yisrael Zaltzman, and the 96-year-old and the eight-day-old baby were given their Jewish names at the ceremony, according to Chabad.

(Israel National News' North American desk is keeping you updated until the start of Shabbat in New York. The time posted automatically on all Israel National News articles, however, is Israeli time.)