Maurice Ascalon

Maurice Ascalon was born in 1913 in Hungary

Maurice Ascalon was born Moshe Klein in 1913 in eastern Hungary. He was drawn to art from a young age, though art was not accepted in the town where he grew up. At 15 he left home to study art in Brussels.

After training in Brussels and later in Milan, he moved to the Land of Israel in 1934. There he met his future wife, Zipora Kartujinsky, who was born in Poland and later became a sculptor.

In 1939 he made a large copper relief of three figures for the Jewish Palestine Pavilion at the New York World's Fair. In the late 1930s he founded Pal-Bell, which made brass and bronze menorahs and other items sold around the world. During the War of Independence he designed munitions and converted his factory to produce them.

In 1956 he moved to the United States and lived in New York and Los Angeles. He worked as a silversmith, making Torah crowns and other ritual objects for synagogues, and taught sculpture at the University of Judaism. In the late 1970s his studio moved to the Philadelphia area, where his son David later ran it.

In his last years he lived in Cuernavaca, Mexico, with his eldest son Adir. He died in August 2003 from complications of Parkinson's disease.