Shalom Moscovitz ("The Watchmaker of Safed") was born in Safed to a Hassidic family that immigrated to Eretz Israel from eastern Europe in the late 18th century. Over the years he worked as a scribe, a goldsmith, a stonecutter, and a billboard painter. He was also known as a watchmaker, and was nicknamed "der Zeigermacher" (Yiddish: "The Watchmaker"). During the War of Independence his workshop was destroyed. He began carving wooden toys on which he painted, which he sold for a living.

- The discovery -
Artist Yosl Bergner, who lived in Safed in the early 1950s, came across
Moscovitz's wooden toys and was enchanted. When they met, he gave Moscovitz sheets of paper and paints, and encouraged him to paint. Their contact was kept until Moscovitz's death in 1980.

- The work -
As an observant Jew, Moscovitz devoted his works to bible stories, which
he often depicted in the spirit of the old Jewish community in Safed.
He unfolded the stories along horizontal rows, with f lat and repetitive
f igures painted in prof ile, alongside captions which revealed the identity
of the f igures and the nature of the depicted scenes. He thus continued
a tradition of popular Jewish art from the 19th century, whose most
conspicuous representatives were Moshe ben Yitzhak Mizrahi Shah (1870-1930) of Jerusalem and Yosef Zvi Geiger (1870-1944) of Safed. Moscovitz painted mainly in acrylic on paper, drawing the contours with ink. Everyday life is incorporated with biblical scenes, and nature depictions are largely founded on his memories of the Australia zoo where he stayed following the deportation of Safed Jews during World War I. In an article published in an American newspaper in 1966 he was called "Grandpa Moses," after the famous naïve American painter "Grandma Moses."