Page 30 - The Architecture of Nadler-Nadler-Bixon-Gil

Shmuel Bixon (standing) as a
student in Bezalel, Jerusalem, 1947
,‫שמואל ביקסון (עומד) בעת לימודיו בבצלאל‬ some of the students were killed in the war. When we
1947 ,‫ירושלים‬
Shmuel Bixon (left) with fellow
students Tova Ziv and Carmeli
Feldman, the Technion, Haifa,
1950s
‫שמואל ביקסון (משמאל) עם חבריו‬
,‫ללימודים טובה זיו וכרמלי פלדמן‬
50‫ שנות ה־‬,‫ חיפה‬,‫הטכניון‬
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injuring his arm in combat near Augusta Victoria Hospital
on Mount Scopus, before returning to the sixth battalion of
the Harel Brigade. “The studies were stopped for a year;
returned to the Technion we started from the beginning
and also studied during holidays,” he recalls.
Bixon grew up in a workers neighborhood near
Beit HaKerem in Jerusalem, where he was born in 1926.
His father, Yitzhak Bixon, born in Estonia and a member
of HeHalutz (the Pioneer) association, immigrated to
Palestine in 1922 and joined Gdud HaAvoda (Work and
Defense Battalion) as a stonemason. When Shmuel
Bixon was a year old the family settled in Beit Hakerem.
By then his father was a stonemasonry contractor
providing raw material for many buildings in Jerusalem, a
partner in a quarry near Arab village Deir-Yassin, and still
working as a stonemason – including in the founding of
David Wolffsohn House (1930) on the Hebrew University
campus on Mount Scopus, which served as the first
National and University Library. From kindergarten to high
school Bixon studied in his neighborhood, including at
Beit Hakerem Seminary. In 1943 he completed his high
school education and joined the training program of the
pioneer-socialist youth movement, Ha’Mahanot HaOlim,
in a Palmach group living at Kibbutz Beit HaArava in the
north Dead Sea area. There he first met the sculptor
Yehiel Shemi (then Stizberg), one of the kibbutz founders,