Hadassa Ben-Itto

Hadassa Ben-Itto, née Lipmanowicz, was born to a Jewish family in Brzezin, Poland. She emigrated with her parents to the British Mandate of Palestine in 1935. She graduated from a treligious high school in Jerusalem and served as an officer in the Israeli army during the 1948 Israeli War of Independence. In 1950, she married Gershon Ben-Itto, a businessman, with whom she had a daughter. She studied history, psychology, and English literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and earned her law degree at Tel Aviv University in 1954. She also did post-graduate work in law and criminology at Northwestern University and the University of Denver. She was admitted to the Israel Bar Association 1955. She worked as a lawyer in private practice, specializing in criminal law, for five years before being appointed as a judge in Tel Aviv Magistrate's Court. In 1970, she went on to the Tel Aviv District Court. From 1971 to 1974 she also taught criminal law at Bar-Ilan University Law School. In 1980, she was appointed acting judge in the Israeli Supreme Court, and in 1988 became deputy president of the Tel Aviv District Court. She also represented Israel at international events, including the 1982 UNESCO Conference on Human Rights in Paris. She took early retirement in 1991 to devote herself to writing her book, The Lie That Wouldn't Die: The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (1998), which has been translated into numerous languages, including English and Arabic. It shows how the Protocols is still read and quoted today as a political treatise, even though various courts over the years have declared it a forgery. From 1998 to 2002, she served as one of the 17 members of the Claims Resolution Tribunal in Zurich to decide on cases against Swiss banks on behalf of Jewish clients killed in the Holocaust.