Ruchama Marton (Hebrew: רוחמה מרטון; born 1937) is an Israeli psychotherapist, psychiatrist, and feminist, and the founder of Physicians for Human Rights-Israel.
Early life and work Ruchama Marton was born in Jerusalem, to Bilha and Aaron Smuelevitch who arrived from Poland in 1929. In Jerusalem she attended the Lämel School (often misspelled 'Lemel School'), a non-religious school for girls. Her family then moved to Tel Aviv, where she attended high school. During her military service, she was a soldier in the Givati Brigade and served during the Sinai War in 1956. She saw members of her regiment killed by friendly fire when the Israeli Air Force mistakenly bombed their positions and witnessed the murder of Egyptian prisoners of war who had surrendered and were unarmed by soldiers from the battalion in which she served In the battlefields of Sinai the first seeds of her anti-militarist (but non-pacifist) attitude and her lifelong commitment to fighting for human rights began. At a time when criticism of the army was practically unheard of, she openly protested the execution of the Egyptian prisoners. After her military service, Marton studied medicine at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and completed medical school in 1963. During this time, she gave birth to her daughter, Orna, and her son, Yuval. While a student in medical school, Marton became active in struggles for women's rights. Together with Professor Dreyfus, she organized activities to change the medical school's policy that only 10% of students could be women. Marton struggled with this policy for many years and was eventually successful. She also organized a fight against an existing ban that forbade female students from wearing pants. This battle almost cost her her place at the medical school, which was at the time the only medical school in Israel, though the university eventually removed the ban. From 1974 to 1986 she worked as a senior psychiatrist at the Mental Health Center "Shalvata" in Hod Hasharon. While there, she tried along with Professor Davidson, director of the hospital, to promote community attitude and access, which was then not accepted in the field of psychiatry. Their idea was to create mental health clinics outside of psychiatric hospitals or centers where patients could go for care. In her work at the hospital she initiated professional survey of private psychiatric hospitals in the Sharon area on a team that included a psychiatrist, a psychologist and a social worker. The goals of the study were to determine whether hospitalization is justified, whether the medication patients received was appropriate, and whether patients could be released if there was improvement in their mental state. This survey was the first of its kind in Israel. From 1975 until 1990, she taught a post graduate program in psychiatry at the Institute of Psychotherapy at Tel Aviv University. At the School of Medicine she made extensive efforts, together with Professor Micha Neumann, director of the university clinic in the Shlvata hospital, to change the criteria for acceptance to medical school, so that a student's grades from humanities courses would bear equal weight to grades in math and the sciences. She believed that the change would improve the quality of the relationship between doctors and patients. In addition, for two years she directed a dynamic group of medical students in processing their experiences with patients in hospitals. After the success of these groups, group dynamics became an accepted part of training. Along with her public activities, Marton pursued academic work in human rights and was a research fellow at the Mary Ingraham Bunting Institute at Radcliffe College of Harvard University from 1997 to 1998, as well as a Research Fellow for Peace and Human Rights at the Research Center for the Middle East at Harvard in 1998 and 1999, and human rights fellow and visiting scholar at the University of Chicago from 1999 to 2000.
… excerpt ends here. Continue reading the full article.
