The woman believed to be the world’s oldest Jew has died in Switzerland, just weeks before her 113th birthday,

Rosa Rein, who lived at an elderly care home in Lugano in the Italian-speaking region of Switzerland, passed away in her sleep.

Celebrating her birthday in 2009, Mrs Rein said she could still walk but had trouble with hearing and with vision.

Born in 1897 in Dzietzkowitz, now Poland, she and her German husband left Europe in 1938 for Brazil to escape the Nazis.

She lost her mother in the Holocaust, who died in a concentration camp.

Mrs Rein’s husband died shortly after arriving in Brazil and she remarried in 1949.

The couple, who had now children, moved back to Europe in 1964 and lived in Pardiso, a town on the outskirts of Lugano.