Biography
Ben-Itto was born on 16 May 1926 in Brzeziny, Poland, to David Lipmanowicz (1904–1994) and Dvora Broder (1906–1988), both natives of Brzeziny. Her father worked as a building contractor. The family immigrated to Palestine in 1935, where another daughter, Nira, was born in 1937.
Ben-Itto graduated from the Ma'aleh religious high school in Jerusalem and was an officer in the Israeli army during the 1948 Israeli War of Independence. She married Gershon Ben-Itto (born 1920) in 1950 and had a daughter, Orly, in 1957. The couple divorced in 1982.
After the War of Independence, Ben-Itto studied history, psychology and English literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She earned her law degree at Tel Aviv University in 1954 and took post-graduate courses in law and criminology at Northwestern University of Chicago and the University of Denver. She was admitted to the Israel Bar Association 1955. For the next five years, she worked as a lawyer in private practice, specializing in criminal law.
Ben-Itto was appointed as a judge in Tel Aviv Magistrate's Court in 1960. In 1970 she moved to the Tel Aviv District Court. Between 1971 and 1974 she also taught criminal law at Bar-Ilan University law school. While conducting a bank robbery trial in July 1980, she survived a bombing attack on her home, which may have been related to the trial. 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 took early retirement from the court in 1991 in order to write her book, The Lie That Wouldn't Die: The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
Read more about this topic: Hadassa Ben-Itto
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