Shoshana Netanyahu

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

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.

She 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.

She married professor Elisha Netanyahu in 1949; their eldest 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.

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