India, July 27 -- A 102-year-old World War II veteran is celebrating his birthday with family, but that is not the only milestone he is looking forward to. Harold Terens, who turned 102 with family and friends in Florida, said that while his brother got the traditional Jewish ceremony marking the beginning of adulthood, the bar mitzvah, when they were kids living in New York, he did not.

"My mother came from Poland. My father came from Russia. And my mother was a religious Jew. And my father was anti-religious. So they had two sons. And one son, they compromised. One son got bar mitzvahed, the other son didn't," he told Associated Press.

However, the war veteran has claimed that he, too, will fulfill his wish for the ceremony early next...