Ruchama Marton

Ruchama Marton was born in 1937 in Jerusalem

Ruchama Marton was born in Jerusalem in 1937. Her parents, Bilha and Aaron, came from Poland in 1929. She attended the Lämel School in Jerusalem, and after her family moved to Tel Aviv she went to high school there.

She served as a soldier in the Givati Brigade and was in Sinai during the 1956 war. She saw comrades killed by friendly fire and the killing of Egyptian prisoners by soldiers of her battalion, and she protested the executions.

She studied medicine at the Hebrew University and finished in 1963. As a student she worked to end a rule that limited women to 10% of medical students, and fought a ban on female students wearing pants. Both efforts succeeded.

From 1974 to 1986 she was a senior psychiatrist at the Shalvata Mental Health Center in Hod Hasharon, where she started a survey of private psychiatric hospitals in the Sharon area. From 1975 to 1990 she taught at Tel Aviv University and worked to give humanities grades equal weight in medical school admission.

She founded Physicians for Human Rights in 1986 and its Israeli branch in 1988. She was a member of the Israeli-Palestinian Council for Peace from 1976 to 1990. Later she held research fellowships at Harvard and the University of Chicago between 1997 and 2000.