Miami Beach marked a joyous annual tradition Friday: Holocaust survivor Mollie Horwitz’s 108th birthday.
“Thank you, God,” Horwitz said in an interview with WPLG Local 10, an ABC News affiliate in Florida.
Her celebration was complete with cake and friends, and family who sang her happy birthday. The city has been making an event of Horwitz’s birthday every year since she turned 100 years old.
Horwitz was born Malka Godur in Lithuania in March 1916. She survived the Holocaust, eventually made her way to Cuba, and in the 1960s arrived in the United States, where she has been living ever since. She has two children, seven grandchildren, and 14 great-grandchildren.
Horwitz is not actually the oldest living Holocaust survivor in the United States — that title belongs to 112-year-old Rose Girone, who lives in New York and is believed to also be the oldest survivor in the world. There are about 245,000 survivors across the world, according to a January report by the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany (also known as the Claims Conference).
