Esther Elam

Esther Elam was born in 1939 in Tel Aviv

Esther Saporta was born in Tel Aviv in 1939 to Miriam and Leon Saporta, Sephardic Jews from Saloniki. She was the second of 4 children. In 1964 she married Zohar Eillam, a psychologist and author she met as a student.

She earned a BA in psychology and philosophy at Tel Aviv University in 1972. She later wrote a master's thesis in sociology on gender stereotypes and worked as a research assistant to Dafna Israeli. In 2002 she completed an MA in philosophy on feminist science.

In 1970, already a mother of 2, she decided to work for change in gender roles. In 1972 she founded the Women's Liberation Group in Tel Aviv, which became the Feminist Movement in Israel, and chaired it until 1992. She led campaigns to amend the abortion laws and for the Basic Law on Equal Rights for Women.

In 1975 Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin appointed her to the Namir Commission on the Status of Women. In 1977 she co-founded the Center for Assistance to Victims of Sexual Assault and coordinated it for its first 4 years. She was also a founder of the Mizrahi feminist group Ahoti, received an honorary doctorate from the Hebrew University, and died in 2023.