Esther Hayut

Origins and early life

Esther Hayut, born Esther Avni, was born on 16 October 1953 in the Shubaki transit camp near Herzliya, the daughter of Holocaust survivors: her father had survived Auschwitz and her mother the Transnistria ghetto. Her parents divorced when she was about a year and a half old, her father moved to England, and she was raised as an only child in her grandparents' home in the Neve Amal neighbourhood of Herzliya.

Work and career

At seventeen she moved with her mother to Eilat, where she finished high school, and in 1971 she enlisted in the Israel Defense Forces and sang in the Central Command Entertainment Troupe. She studied law at Tel Aviv University, graduating in 1977, and practised commercial and tort law, from 1985 in partnership with her husband, David Hayut. She became a judge of the Tel Aviv Magistrate's Court in March 1990 and of the Tel Aviv District Court in 1996, and she joined the Supreme Court as an acting justice in March 2003 and as a permanent justice in May 2004.

She chaired the Central Elections Committee from May 2015 to March 2017, and on 26 October 2017 she was sworn in as the twelfth President of the Supreme Court of Israel. In 2023, her last year in office, she publicly opposed the government's judicial reform plan, and she retired on 16 October 2023, on reaching the mandatory age of seventy, after thirty-three years on the bench. No source states her Jewish identity in so many words: her biographies record parents who survived Auschwitz and the Transnistria ghetto, but the biography of an Israeli judge has little reason to say more.

She is here under the Israeli presumption the site adopted on 7 September 2026 — a Hebrew given name and surname, a life in Israel and a strong attested tie, here her presidency of the Supreme Court of Israel — which is a presumption and not a declaration, and which any contrary source overturns.