Moshe Kupferman was born 12 August 1926 in the small Polish city of Jaroslaw in east Galicia, and was raised in a traditonal Jewish family, his father a shopkeeper, his grandfather a coppersmith. However, his childhood and formal schooling ended abruptly with the outbreak of the Second World War. In September 1939, the German army occupied Jaroslaw and a few weeks later rounded up the city's Jewish population and forced them eastward to Soviet-occupied territory. In the summer of 1940, Kupferman's family was arrested by the Soviets and transported to a work camp in the Urals. The family was later transferred to Kazakhstan in central Asia. Although Kupferman stresses that he was not a victim of the Holocaust, he was the only member of his family to survive the war.

Kupferman was eighteen when the war ended. He returned from the Soviet Union and spent over a year in refugee camps in Germany. While in Munich he visited the old master collection of the Alte Pinakothek - his first experience of high art. It inspired him to pick up a pencil: "I just started to draw. Nothing serious, a cross between natuarlism and expressionism, but a safety valve, a way of letting out what was inside me."

Kupferman immigrated to Israel in 1948, the year of its declaration of statehood and the ensuing War of Independence. Determined to remake his life physically and spiritually, he trained in the building trades. The rational activity of building, of planning and constructing order, was a profoundly regenerative experience that the artist would later translate to his painting. In 1949 he joined a group of other war refugees in founding a collective community in western Galilee, Kibbutz Lohamei Ha-Gettaot (Kibbutz of the Ghetto Fighters) The following year he married Mia Simhoni. They eventually had four children. Throughout the 1950s Kupferman worked in construction.

Although family and work obligations slowed his artistic development, Kupferman made time to cultivate his talent. For all practical purposes, he is self-taught. His formal instruction was limited to a painting class with a local landscape painter in Haifa, and brief courses under the direction of Zaritsky and Stematsky.The leaders of the New Horizons group of lyrical abstract painters deeply influenced Kupferman's expressive and intensely personal approach to abstraction.

At first Kupferman had to fight for the right to pursue his art at Lohamei Ha-Gettaot, struggling just to survive during the 1950's. Over time, however, Kupferman convinced his fellow members of the value of a creative life to the community. By 1960 he was permitted half the week to work in his studio. Since 1967 he has painted full-time.

In 1961, Kupferman traveled to Europe, spending six months in Paris, where he let a studio and painted. Several years later and by then a mature artist, Kupferman paid his first visit to the United States, staying four months in New York. Manhattan - its architecture as much as its art - affirmed his confidence in his chosen direction and, in consequence, his drawings gained greater independence and importance within his work. He has made several return visits to New York.

Since the late 1950's, his work has been shown in galleries and museum exhibitions in Israel, Europe, the USA and Japan.