Dalia Dorner

Dalia Dorner was born in 1934 in Istanbul

Dalia Dorner was born Dolly Greenberg in Istanbul, Turkey, in 1934. Her father, a wood merchant, had come there from Odessa. The family moved to Mandatory Palestine in 1944, and her father died soon after.

She attended a Youth Aliyah boarding school near Nahariya and then the Hebrew Reali School in Haifa. During her army service she began studying law in Tel Aviv, and she later finished her law studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She married Shmuel Dorner in 1958, and they have 2 sons.

After a period in a legal role with the Israel Police, she joined the Military Advocate General's office and served as Chief Military Defense Counsel. In 1974 she became a judge on the Military Court of Appeals with the rank of Colonel.

After leaving the army she became a District Court judge in Beersheba and later in Jerusalem. She sat on the panel that convicted John Demjanjuk and sentenced him to death in 1988, a decision the Supreme Court overturned in 1993. In April 1993 she was appointed to the Supreme Court, where she later headed the Central Elections Committee.

She retired from the Supreme Court in 2004. In 2006 she became president of the Israel Press Council, and she teaches human rights law at Bar-Ilan University. In 2010 she lit a torch at the Independence Day ceremony on Mount Herzl.