Or belonging anywhere: this is our world … ” “And, funnily enough, it gave me a feeling of belonging in London, too.

“The sense of what we’d done gave me enormous confidence, and I really felt as if I belonged,” he said. Sassoon served in the Palmach until Israel’s establishment in May 1948, an experience that significantly changed him. Angered by the fact that the British government was turning away ships with Holocaust survivors, Sassoon and Konopinsky left England with one-way tickets “to do our duty.' As Sassoon later said, 'We were two physical young men, and we were itching to make sure Israel gained its independence.” In 1948, Sassoon travelled illegally to British Mandate Palestine with friend and fellow '43 Group' member, Jules Konopinski. During his career as a hairstylist, Sassoon created what English fashionista Hilary Alexander called “the most radical hair shift since 1920’s” because he updated the short women’s haircut known as the “bob” for 1960's celebrities.

The group’s members returned to Britain after World War II only to find supporters of Fascism and anti-Semitism, like the infamous Oswald Mosley.Ī Fascist-fighter by night and a hairdresser by day, the young Sassoon said he realized after watching Ingrid Bergman in the 1943 war movie “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” that strong women fighters must have low-maintenance hairstyles to improve their talents. When he was seventeen years old, Sassoon joined the '43 Group,' a coalition of British Jewish ex-servicemen who fought against fascists in the streets of London. In spite of his interest in and passion for architecture - namely Bauhaus designs - Sassoon spent his days shampooing the hair of Cohen’s clients and perceived that avenue as his only realistic career option.

Raised primarily by his mother Betty after his father abandoned the family, Sassoon and his brother Ivor lived for seven years in the Spanish and Portuguese Jewish Orphanage in Maida Vale (London) until his mother remarried in 1940 when Vidal was eleven years old.Īt age fourteen, Sassoon became apprentice to an East End wigmaker named Adolph Cohen, who made “ sheitels” (hair coverings) for Orthodox Jewish women. Sassoon (born Janudied May 9, 2012) was born in Hammersmith, a borough of West London in the United Kingdom, to a Greek Jewish father and Ukranian Jewish mother. Vidal Sassoon was a Jewish British hairdresser said to have 'changed the world with a pair of scissors.' He was also a major anti-defamation philanthropist.

Vidal sassoon