Shoshana Netanyahu

Shoshana Netanyahu
Justice at the Supreme Court of Israel
In office 1981–1993
Personal details
Born	Shoshana Shenburg (1923-04-06)6 April 1923 Free City of Danzig
Died	7 October 2022(2022-10-07) (aged 99) Jerusalem, Israel
Spouse	Elisha Netanyahu
Children	2, including Nathan
Occupation	Judge, lawyer

Shoshana Netanyahu (Hebrew: שׁוֹשַׁנָּה נְתַנְיָהוּ; 6 April 1923 – 7 October 2022) was an Israeli judge and lawyer who was a justice at the Supreme Court of Israel. She was married to mathematician Elisha Netanyahu (1912–1986), who was the uncle of Benjamin Netanyahu, current Prime Minister of Israel.

Biography

Netanyahu was born Shoshana Shenburg in 1923, in the Free City of Danzig (now Gdańsk, Poland). She immigrated to Palestine with her family in 1924, and settled in the Bat Galim neighborhood of Haifa. She graduated from the Reali High School in Haifa 1941, and took British Mandate-operated legal classes.

Netanyahu worked at the law firm of S. Horowitz, and then spent a year serving as assistant prosecutor in the Israel Air Force. She returned to her previous position, and two years later moved to the advocate firm, Friedman and Komisar.

In 1949, she married professor Elisha Netanyahu; their elder son was born in 1951. In 1953, the family left for a sabbatical at Stanford University, where their second son was born.

In 1960, she returned to Friedman and Komisar. In 1969, she was appointed a judge on the Magistrates Court in Haifa and from 1974 to 1981 she served as a Haifa District Court judge. In 1981, she became the second female Israel Supreme Court justice, after Miriam Ben-Porat's retirement. She retired from the Supreme Court in 1993. During her tenure, she also headed a national committee on health care in Israel from 1988 to 1990, which led to major legislative changes.

Following her retirement from the bench, Netanyahu was an adjunct lecturer at the University of Haifa (1993–1998) and at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (1993–2002). In 1993, she received the Women’s League for Conservative Judaism award. She received an honorary doctorate from the University of Haifa in 1997. In 2002, she was made an honorary citizen of Jerusalem.

Netanyahu had two children: Nathan (b. 1951), a professor of computer science at Bar-Ilan University, and Dan (b. 1954), an information systems auditor.

External links

• Salokar, Rebecca Mae; Mary L. Volcansek (1996). Women in Law: A Bio-bibliographical Sourcebook. Greenwood Publishing Group. p. 376. ISBN 0-313-29410-0.
• Martin Edelman, "The Judicial Elite of Israel", International Political Science Review, Vol. 13, No. 3 (July 1992), pp. 235–248.
• Shmuel Penchas, Mordechai Shani, "Redesigning a national health-care system: the Israeli experience", International Journal of Health Care Quality Assurance, volume 8 (1995), issue 2, pp. 9–17.