Rosa Ginossar

Rosa Ginossar, born Rosa Hacohen on July 14, 1890, in Gomel in the Russian Empire, and who died in Israel in 1979, was a lawyer regarded as the first woman to practice law in what became Israel. She earned a law diploma from the University of Paris in 1913 and returned to Mandatory Palestine in 1922, where the bar authorities twice rejected her application to sit the bar examination, in 1922 and again in 1924; only after she petitioned the High Court did the Supreme Court rule, in February 1930, that women could become lawyers, and on February 17, 1930, she passed the bar examination as the second woman to do so, after Freda Slutzkin, receiving her law license on July 26, 1930. She opened a solo practice in Jerusalem, later joined by her sister-in-law as a partner, and continued to practice through the 1930s and 1940s before ceasing legal work in 1949 when her husband became Israel's ambassador to Italy; she went on to serve as president of the Women's International Zionist Organization from 1966 to 1970 and was made an Honorary Citizen of Jerusalem in 1974.