Cecile Klein, 114, was Canada’s oldest person for 7 months
Cecile Klein with her daughter Harriet Nussbaum (right) and granddaughter Elaine Nussbaum (left).
(JTA) — Cecile Klein, an energetic supercentenarian with ties to Montreal’s Jewish community and institutions, spent seven months as Canada’s oldest person, before passing away on Jan. 13.
An obituary for Klein published in the Canadian Jewish News notes that in addition to living through two pandemics and two world wars, and working for her Israel-born husband’s pharmaceutical company, she volunteered throughout her life, notably helping her father fundraise for Montreal’s Jewish General Hospital.
The Montreal native attended continuing education-style courses at the hospital, which is affiliated with McGill University, into her 100s. According to the Jewish News, she kept up with world news on the daily, reading a newspaper — without glasses — until she was 111. She also regularly went to fitness classes at the city’s Cummings Jewish Centre for Seniors, which opened in 2000 — suggesting she exercised well into her 90s and beyond.
Klein was preceded in death by her late husband Erwin Klein, whom she married in 1932. She is survived by her three children Harriet, Louise and Arnold, eight grandchildren, 18 great-grandchildren and five great-great-grandchildren.
In the same week, New Jersey’s oldest resident, a Jewish woman named Edith Hodes Rose, died on Jan. 11 at the age 111.
Rose was the daughter of a seltzer salesman, who at first made deliveries with a horse-drawn wagon, according to a New Jersey Jewish News article about her 100th birthday in 2010. Her parents immigrated from what is now Latvia, the NJJN reported, at the turn of the 20th century. Six of their eight children lived into their 90s, and two of them, including Rose, lived into their 100s — leading the New York-based Albert Einstein College of Medicine to enroll them in a study about longevity, NJ.com reported.
Rose grew up in Newark and later lived in Maplewood, and along the way was a member of multiple New Jersey synagogues, along with Essex County’s National Council of Jewish Women. She answered the time-honored question of how she lived so long for the NJJN.
“Good genes, I suppose — and sheer luck,” she said. “Maybe doing things in moderation — but mainly luck.”
—
The post Cecile Klein, 114, was Canada’s oldest person for 7 months appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
