Shlomo Van den Berg was born of Dutch parents in Germany in 1920. In 1936, Van den Berg came to Israel with the Youth Aliyah (an organization that rescued thousands of Jewish children from the Nazis during the Third Reich), and was a member of the Kibbutz Maoz-Hayim until 1949. Largely an autodidact, he worked for a period of time with the painter Joseph Zaritzky and studied at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris from 1953-54.
