Miriam Ben-Porat

Miriam Ben-Porat was born on January 25, 1918, in Vitebsk — then part of Russia and now located in present-day Belarus — and later grew up in Kaunas (Kovno), Lithuania.[1] Her birth name was Miriam Shinezon, also rendered Sheinsohn, and she was one of seven children.[1][2] Her parents, Haya and Eliezer Shinezon, owned a textile factory, and the family's life was rooted in the Jewish communities of Eastern Europe.[2]

After completing high school in 1936, the eighteen-year-old Ben-Porat immigrated to British Mandatory Palestine on her own.[1][2] Most of her family remained in Europe and was killed in the Holocaust; her parents and one of her brothers were murdered in Lithuania in 1941.[2][3] In the Yishuv, she adopted the Hebrew surname Ben-Porat, which JewishGen describes as a translation of Sheinsohn.[2] Her unaccompanied immigration and the subsequent destruction of much of her family formed the personal background to her long public career.

Ben-Porat was among the early women to study law in Jerusalem and completed her legal studies in 1945.[1][2] The Office of the State Comptroller identifies her institution as the Jerusalem Law Classes and says she qualified as a lawyer after an internship at the law firm of Yitzhak Olshan, who later became president of the Supreme Court.[1] She was admitted to the bar in 1945.[2]

In 1948 she entered government service, joining the Ministry of Justice as a prosecutor.[4][5] She later became deputy state attorney.[1] Among the most consequential assignments of this period was her prosecution of the defendants who had murdered Israel Kasztner. Attorney General Haim Cohn asked her to handle the case shortly before she left the prosecution service, and she later described it as her "finale" there and a springboard for her wider legal career.[6]

During the 1950s Ben-Porat was involved in another notable criminal matter: in Victor Mizan's rape-and-murder appeal, she argued for acquittal on the basis of an uncontrollable-impulse defense.[7] She also wrote commentaries on the laws of assignments and contracts and contributed articles to the Israel Law Review and other professional journals.[8]

Ben-Porat was appointed a judge of the Jerusalem District Court in 1958 and served there for eighteen years before becoming its president.[1][3] Her rulings established precedents in areas including inheritance, defamation, contracts, and criminal law.[3] In a 1980 marital-rape case, she reasoned that forced intercourse within marriage was unlawful, an interpretation that was subsequently accepted when an application for a further hearing was dismissed.[3]

An election case from her district-court years illustrated her concern for both legal procedure and practical consequences. Ben-Porat initially held a Jerusalem Municipal Council election invalid because fifty ballot envelopes had not been stamped and counted as required. After determining that the omission had resulted from a good-faith error, she proposed legislative validation of the ballots. The Knesset passed an ad hoc law, the envelopes were opened, and their contents did not change the allocation of the contested seat, avoiding a new election.[3]

Ben-Porat became vice president of the District Court in May 1975 and president in December of that year.[3] Alongside her judicial work, she taught law at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem from 1964 to 1978 and attained the rank of associate professor.[1] She published in legal journals including Hapraklit, Mishpatim, Iyunei Mishpat, and The Israel Law Review.[1]

In November 1976 Ben-Porat was appointed an acting justice of Israel's Supreme Court.[8] Her appointment became permanent in March 1977, when President Ephraim Katzir appointed her alongside Shimon Asher.[1][9] She was the first woman to serve on Israel's Supreme Court and the first woman to sit on the highest judicial body of a country using common law.[10] She remained the only woman on the Court throughout her twelve years there.[11]

Her rulings combined legal analysis with considerations including equality, good faith, common sense, and practical consequences.[3] In the Zaytsev case, she established the "wrongful birth" doctrine in Israeli law, while in the Kolbotek case she addressed the boundaries between investigative journalism and privacy.[7]

One of the most debated decisions of her Supreme Court tenure was the Barzilai case, arising from pretrial pardons granted to senior Shin Bet officials following the Bus 300 affair. The Court considered whether the president could constitutionally grant a pardon before trial. Ben-Porat joined Supreme Court President Meir Shamgar in holding that the power existed, while Justice Aharon Barak dissented. Ben-Porat stated that such pardons had to be "extremely rare," with the seriousness of the alleged offenses weighed against a significant public interest.[12]

A Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs article identifies Ben-Porat as one of the five judges who heard the May 15, 1988, case of Moshe Neiman et al. v. Chairman of the Central Election Committee for the Eleventh Knesset, concerning the decision to ban the Kach movement.[13] Ben-Porat served as deputy president of the Supreme Court from 1983 until retiring from the bench in 1988.[1]

On July 4, 1988, Ben-Porat became Israel's State Comptroller and Ombudswoman, the first woman to hold the office.[1] She served two terms totaling ten years, through 1998.[1][11] The office's audit remit covered government and local-government bodies, the armed forces, state-linked institutions, and other bodies subject to review. Its scrutiny included legality, integrity, proper management, efficiency, and economy. The Comptroller could publish findings and recommend a criminal investigation when wrongdoing was suspected but lacked administrative power to enforce laws or impose sanctions.[14]

Ben-Porat made the Comptroller's Office more active and publicly prominent. She replaced an emphasis on retrospective scrutiny with special reports and preventive measures intended to address improper conduct before it occurred, while greater use of the media increased public awareness of state audit work.[3] Her investigations covered subjects including immigrant absorption, water management, and gas-mask distribution.[10] She maintained that the Comptroller should not act as an enforcement body but argued that its conclusions could produce practical consequences, citing changes in water administration and the dismissal of a Water Commissioner.[11]

Her audits examined corruption, political finance, security agencies, and emergency preparedness. A retrospective account records that a report on Shin Bet practices remained classified despite her objections and that she required political parties to publish their donor lists.[7] She also criticized the distribution of ineffective gas masks before the Gulf War.[11]

In 1995 Ben-Porat submitted a report on allocations in the Ministry of Religious Affairs. During the 1990s the ministry had an annual budget of approximately 1.5 billion shekels and controlled thousands of allocations to religious organizations. A series of comptroller reports revealed fictitious reporting and fraudulent expenses. Her report stated: "The picture emerging from this report is very serious, as if ethical values and fundamental principles of truth and integrity have ceased to exist. The ministry has failed in its role of responsibility for allocating public funds."[15]

Political and improper appointments were another central concern. Ben-Porat's final annual report devoted 48 pages to the subject and examined 25 cases, eight involving Deputy Housing Minister Meir Porush. It stated that political outlook should not influence appointments and that even one political consideration could disqualify a selection.[16]

Among the cases reviewed, a Housing Culture Association director had been selected by a six-member committee even though the organization's bylaws required at least eleven members. Ben-Porat found the appointment invalid and concluded that Porush had imposed his preferred candidate, depriving the committee of independent discretion. She also criticized efforts to replace the director general of Amidar, finding that the political level appeared to have selected a successor in advance rather than leaving the decision to the company's board.[16]

Her audits identified improper appointments in other public bodies as well. Six appointments at the Council for the Prevention of Accidents were found to violate proper-administration rules. In another case, an unpaid adviser in the Prime Minister's Office began working before the required approvals were completed, and the employment ended only after the audit drew attention to it.[16]

In 2007, after leaving the Comptroller's Office, Ben-Porat reviewed the case of Suleiman al-Abid, who had been convicted of the rape and murder of Hanit Kikos. Her 26-page report to Justice Minister Daniel Friedmann concluded that guilt had been proved beyond reasonable doubt despite disagreements among courts. She nevertheless recommended considering a reduction or commutation of his sentence because public doubts created the appearance that an innocent person might be imprisoned.[17]

Throughout her career Ben-Porat maintained a parallel scholarly identity. From 1964 to 1978 she taught law at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and attained the rank of associate professor while holding judicial office.[1] She wrote commentaries on the laws of assignments and contracts and published articles in professional periodicals, including Hapraklit, Mishpatim, Iyunei Mishpat, and The Israel Law Review.[1][8]

In 2005 she published Basic Law: State Comptroller, a study of the legal framework governing the office she had led for a decade.[1] Her autobiography, Through the Robe, appeared in 2010 and presented a personal account of her legal and public career.[1]

Ben-Porat was also interviewed for a volume of conversations with Israeli experts and thinkers about Israel's future. Her contribution was titled "Fighting the Administration's Abuse of Power," reflecting a central concern of her later career.[18]

Miriam Ben-Porat's career produced a sequence of historic firsts that expanded women's participation in Israeli public life. Her permanent Supreme Court appointment made her the first woman on Israel's highest court and the first woman on the highest judicial body of a country using common law.[10] After leaving the Court, she became Israel's first female State Comptroller and remained the only woman to have held the office at the time of her death.[11]

Her decade as State Comptroller left a substantial institutional legacy. She introduced preventive reports, drew greater public attention to government auditing, and used the office to scrutinize corruption, improper appointments, political finance, emergency preparedness, and failures of public administration.[7][3] Accounts of her tenure describe her as strengthening the Comptroller's role as the "watchdog of Israel's democracy."[8]

Her judicial legacy included contributions to criminal, inheritance, defamation, contract, and tort law. The wrongful-birth doctrine associated with the Zaytsev case entered Israeli tort jurisprudence, while her decisions on marital rape, municipal elections, privacy, and freedom of expression reflected her combination of doctrinal analysis and practical judgment.[7][3]

Ben-Porat received the Israel Prize in 1991 for her special contribution to society and the State.[1][19] She received honorary degrees from the University of Pennsylvania in 1993 and Hebrew Union College in Jerusalem in 1999.[3] The Movement for Quality Government in Israel presented her with its highest award in 1995.[20] In 2004 the City of Jerusalem honoured her with the title of Yakir Yerushalayim — Worthy Citizen of Jerusalem.[1][19]

After retiring from the Comptroller's Office, she remained active in public causes. She was a member of the Committee for the Prevention of Destruction of Antiquities on the Temple Mount, established in early 2000 in response to repeated damage to antiquities there. Other members included author A.B. Yehoshua, former Supreme Court President Meir Shamgar, and Meir Dagan.[21]

Ben-Porat died at her home in Jerusalem on July 26, 2012, at the age of ninety-four.[11]

Published sources disagree on several dates in Ben-Porat's biography. The current Office of the State Comptroller page gives her birth date as January 25, 1918.[1] The Jewish Women's Archive gives April 26, while the Jewish Virtual Library gives January 18.[3][4] Most accounts place her immigration to Mandatory Palestine in 1936, but the Encyclopaedia Judaica entry reproduced by the Jewish Virtual Library gives 1931.[2][8]

The two Jewish Virtual Library biographies also differ on her prosecutorial chronology: one places her State Attorney's Office service in 1948–1953 and her deputy state attorney service in 1953–1958, while the Encyclopaedia Judaica entry says she served as deputy state attorney from 1950 to 1958.[4][8] For her principal career chronology, this article follows the current official biography and sources agreeing that she served as State Comptroller from 1988 to 1998.[1][11]