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World Jewish News
The Oldest Jew in the World Died in Donetsk
06.01.2009
In late December 2008, one of the oldest people in the world, the oldest resident of Ukraine, the oldest member of the Jewish community of Donetsk - Mikhail Yefimovich Krichevsky passed away in Donetsk. In less than two months he would have turned 112.
Krichevsky became a legend during his lifetime. Leaving his peers and colleagues far behind in the 1900s, a person of three centuries, he was the last living veteran of World War I.
He was also the last of the earth to have met and talked to the prominent Russian writer V.G. Korolenko. He was also a prominent inventor, the last of those Donbass miners of the thirties, who made an unprecedented contribution to the increase in mining labor productivity...
A unique person! The one and only! In 1913, he miraculously appeared to be present at the Beilis trial, a loud case that was based on heinous bloody libel and stirred all Russia.
He was a cadet. He heard the speeches by Kerensky on the one hand and the representative of Lenin, Piatakov, on the other.
How did his big life begin? Michael Krichevsky graduated from Ekaterinoslavsk business school with honors, then entered another college - Kiev military-engineering school, which he left in the rank of praporshik (ensign).
In 1924 he finished the Mining Institute and was sent to work in the Donbass region. There he got married. On Donbass mines Michael Efremovich worked mostly in management positions. In the 1920s, he, a young man, was appointed to head one of the major departments.
He patented dozens of inventions and innovations. The Socialistic Donbass called his coal-cutter, which increased the advance speed1, a "miracle machine," and himself a "wonderful designer."
When the Great Patriotic War began, Krichevsky was granted exemption from duty and sent to the Ural to develop the coal industry. In 1946, after the war ended, he again moved to Donetsk, where the restored the mines destroyed by war, and was awarded the Order of the Red Banner of Labor for this.
Here, in Donetsk, Krichevsky worked in the Research Institute of Mining until his old age.
According to the British gerontologists, Michael Krichevsky was the oldest man in the world to be in such a sound mind. And indeed — clarity of thinking, good memory, fine irony and iron logic were characteristic of him.
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