His childhood in Juvenishki, a small shtetl near Vilnius, had a profound impact on his artistic sensibility. There, he discovered hatas (small wooden houses), the water carrier, and Tevie the milk seller, and developed his passion for drawing by sketching the horses he rode bareback. To finance his studies at the Beaux-Arts, he regularly traveled to Russia to buy furs, developing an expertise as a fur matcher that would serve him well later.
The war turned her life upside down: after taking refuge in Nice in 1942, her family was denounced. Her stepfather was murdered by a collaborating militiaman, and Nadia was deported to Auschwitz, where he joined the resistance in the maquis. In 1945, Nadia miraculously returned from deportation and found her shop in Les Lilas.
Emigrating to Israel in 1951 ended in commercial failure, leading them to settle in Montreal in 1955. An eye allergy forced him to abandon his work in 1959. Nadia, seeing his depression, offered him canvases, brushes, and colors, reminding him that she had known him as a painter. Inspired by his readings of Sholem Aleikhem, he spontaneously rediscovered his childlike gaze and painted his memories of the shtetl in a naive style.
His new works were enthusiastically received. He exhibited at the WMHA in Montreal and then accompanied his son to Mexico City in 1960 for an exhibition at the Centro Deportivo. For ten years, Nadia organized exhibitions across the United States and Canada.
In 1962, they returned to Israel, where Simon settled in Safed, becoming a member of the artists' colony. He now alternated between Safed in the summer and New York in the winter, finally realizing his dream of becoming a painter during his last 22 years. He died in 1982 at the age of 79 and is buried in the Safed cemetery, joined by Nadia in 2009. His work lovingly immortalizes the daily life of the shtetl: weddings, festivals, markets, diverse characters, a poignant testimony to a vanished world that he then revisits through his new community in Safed.
