Moshe Yassur was born in 1934 as Marcel Simon Stuermer in Iasi, a university town and capital of the northeastern Romanian province of Moldavia, close to the border with Ukraine. His father, of German-Jewish origin, was a sales representative for the Singer Company and traveled a great deal.

Since his mother's family was for generations dealers of wine and plum brandy in Rǎducǎneni, a small village (shtetl) about twenty kilometers east of Iasi, Moshe spent his early childhood among the village folk-the vintners, coopers, smiths, cobblers, and bakers-in this fertile region of Romania.