Gene Simmons
Israeli-American musician and songwriter (born 1949)
Gene Simmons (born Chaim Witz; Hebrew: חיים ויץ [χaˈim ˈvits]; August 25, 1949), also known by his stage persona "the Demon", is an Israeli and American musician and songwriter. He was the bassist and co-lead singer of the hard rock band Kiss, which he co-founded with Paul Stanley, Ace Frehley, and Peter Criss in 1973. Simmons, alongside Stanley, remained a constant member of the band until their dissolution in 2023. Simmons is also known for his long tongue and for his reality television show, Gene Simmons Family Jewels, which aired from 2006 to 2012. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2014 as a member of Kiss.
Early life and education
Simmons was born Chaim Witz on August 25, 1949, in Haifa, Israel, to Jewish refugees from Hungary. His mother, Flóra Kovács (later Florence Klein, then Florence Lubowski) (1925–2018), was born in Jánd in the Northern Great Plain region of eastern Hungary. She survived internment in Nazi concentration camps from November 1944 to her liberation from the Mauthausen camp in Austria on May 5, 1945. She and her brother, Larry Klein, were the only members of the family to survive the Holocaust. Witz's father, Ferenc "Feri" Yehiel Witz (1925–2002), was a carpenter whom Klein married in 1946; the couple moved to Mandatory Palestine the following year.
“Gene Simmons” enters the record as israeli-American musician and songwriter (born 1949). Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Gene, Simmons and Israeli-American can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Gene Simmons” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Gene, Simmons and Israeli-American provides the most credible route into that argument.
Chronology provides the most reliable spine for this subject; interpretation should follow only after identities and dates are secure. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 21, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q207197. VIAF identifies the subject as 61746547. The Library of Congress control number is n92105748. 4 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1949, 1973, 2023 and 2006.
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This entry incorporates text from “Gene Simmons” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.