Israeli centenarian finally turns 25

At long last, Maniya Bergson got to celebrate her 25th birthday.

Born February 29, 1916, in Poland, Bergson’s birthday only comes around every 1,461 days. Monday therefore marked 100 years since she was born, but only 25 birthdays.

The combination of her 100th year and the leap-year birthday made her irresistible for Monday’s Channel 2 News broadcast.

“What blessing would you like on your 100th birthday?” anchor Oded Ben-Ami asked in a televised interview.

“Health isn’t important to me anymore, yes?” Bergson answered with an air of pragmatism. “I’m close to the end, yes? The way I am now, I’m satisfied with that.”

To some extent, Bergson’s story is that of the country as a whole.

Born in what is now Poland, she didn’t celebrate her birthday very often growing up. “After WWI, we belonged to Poland,” she told Ben-Ami. She was enrolled in a private school network that taught Hebrew, she explained. “The Polish education minister approved it. So I began my studies in a Hebrew kindergarten.”

She moved to Israel after WWII, in 1947. A son, Amichai, was killed in combat during the 1973 Yom Kippur War.

And she’s not happy with the current government, she was happy to inform.

“When you look today, Maniya, at what is happening to us here, are you satisfied or are you critical?” Ben-Ami asked.

“No, I’m disappointed in the government,” she answered, “I’m not happy with the government of Netanyahu. I’m not explicitly leftist, but I’m not satisfied.”

US census figures show that just some 0.0173% of the US population reaches the age of 100. Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics lumps together Israelis aged 95 and over, reporting some 9,700 of them in 2014. If Israel’s percentages are the same as that of the US, that would put the population of centenarians in the Jewish state at some 1,460.

(We’ve been wondering what the odds were of an Israeli turning 100 — that is, 25 — on February 29, 2016. One in 1,461 multiplied by what? Feel free to compute in the comments below.)