Felicia Langer

Felicia Langer was born in 1930 in Tarnów

Felicia Langer was born Felicia Veitt in 1930 in Tarnów, Poland, to Jewish parents. In 1939 her family fled to the Soviet Union, where her father, a lawyer, died in the gulag. In 1949 she married Mieciu Langer, a Holocaust survivor.

The couple immigrated to Israel in 1950, and their son Michael was born in 1953. She studied law from 1959 and earned her degree in 1965. She was active in the communist party Maki and later in Rakah.

After the 1967 Six-Day War she opened an office in Jerusalem and represented Palestinians in security cases, deportations, house demolitions and land disputes. In 1979 the Supreme Court canceled, at her request, the deportation order against Nablus mayor Bassam Shaka. For years she was vice president of the Israeli League for Human and Civil Rights.

In 1990 she closed her office and moved with her husband to Tübingen, Germany. She taught at universities, kept writing books on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and became a German citizen in 2008. Her 2009 German Cross of Merit drew public criticism from Jewish groups and others.

She died in Germany in 2018.