Gene Simmons: I never touched drugs because of my mother’s suffering in the Holocaust

Speaking to The Jerusalem Post during a visit to Israel in 2011, Simmons referred to his mother’s Holocaust experience.

By DAVID BRINN DECEMBER 15, 2024 16:11

GENE SIMMONS of KISS attends the 2021 Tribeca Festival screening of ‘Biography: KISStory’ in New York City in 2021. (photo credit: Monica Schipper/Getty Images)

An online meme displaying photos of Kiss founder Gene Simmons with his mother and a story about how her past as a Holocaust survivor kept him on the straight and narrow throughout his hard rock career has gone viral.

The photo montage shows the Jewish-Israeli rocker – born Chaim Witz in Haifa – dressed in full Kiss regalia with his proud diminutive mother, Flora, along with a story in which he explains that he has never touched drugs or alcohol because his mother had to endure the horrors of the Nazi concentration camps, including the Mauthausen camp in Austria.

“I’m her only child,” the musician is quoted in the meme. “I knew I had no right to hurt my mother. Life had already done enough to her.”

Speaking to The Jerusalem Post during a visit to Israel in 2011, Simmons referred to his mother’s Holocaust experience.

“When I was growing up, my mother hardly ever talked to me about Nazi Germany and the concentration camps because she didn’t want to upset me, and I hardly ever asked her about it,” said Simmons.

Gene Simmons of Kiss (credit: REUTERS)

“But over the years, I started to learn more about it and about how my entire family was killed and how my mother saw her mother go with her grandmother to the gas chambers.”

After being freed, Flora moved to Israel and married, and Simmons spent his childhood in Tirat Carmel, where his father was a carpenter. Flora left her husband in 1958 and took young Chaim to Jackson Heights, Queens, where he went by the name Gene Klein, Flora’s maiden name.

Simmons was still 'Chaim' to his mother 

Even once he achieved mega-success as the fire-breathing, tongue-wagging bassist for Kiss, Simmons was still Chaim to his mother.

The meme contains Simmons describing his first major interview with Rolling Stone in the 1970s.

“When I met the Rolling Stone writer, I was very careful to cultivate the mystique of the demon. I wore all my spider and silver jewelry and my leather pants. I puffed my hair as big as it could go. With my seven-inch platform boots with silver dollar signs on them and black nail polish, I thought I was ready to project the perfect rock-and-roll image.

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Then, at one point, the doorbell rang. I answered it, and there was my mother at the door with enough food to feed the world: fresh soups, veal chops, pancakes, jams, and cakes.

She insisted that the writer and I – whom she referred to as “hungry boys” – stop what we were doing and eat. She kept calling me by my Hebrew name, Chaim, and told the writer that I was a good boy. The big, bad demon was just a mama’s boy.”