December marked 100 years since women were able, for the first time, to become lawyers in the UK.

Jewish women were among the first to seize the opportunity to practise and their contribution has been extraordinary.

The first woman ever to represent a client in court in the British Empire was Ethel Rebecca Benjamin who, in 1897, sought the recovery of a debt in her native New Zealand.

The daughter of Orthodox Jews who had emigrated from England in the late 1860s, she was admitted as a barrister and solicitor on May 10, 1897, in New Zealand.

She married Alfred De Costa, a Wellington stockbroker and in 1908 they moved to England. During World War I, Ethel De Costa managed a bank in Sheffield — the first woman bank manager in the UK.

In March, 1920, Dr Averyl Harcourt, daughter of the Reverend M.E. Duke-Cohen, Chief Rabbi of Calcutta, was admitted as a student of Middle Temple. Rita Reuben, daughter of Nassim Reuben of Singapore was called to the Bar by Middle Temple in January, 1924.

Maria Alice Phillips, née Westell, was called to the Bar by Middle Temple on November 19 1923, the first Jewish woman barrister in England and Wales. She celebrated her 100th birthday in 2001, together with her large family, with a ride on the London Eye.

Sara Moshkowitz was called to the Bar in November 1925. Born in Kishinev, she arrived in England in 1920 and was granted a scholarship by Lincoln’s Inn. She combined legal practice with painting and exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1930.

She took a strong interest in Zionist activities and made Aliyah to Palestine where, by 1939, she was one of only three women practising lawyers, specialising in commercial law.

Edith Vera Cohen, called to the Bar in 1929, practised on the Northern Circuit, became the mother, grandmother and great-grandmother of a succession of successful lawyers. Her passion, however, was for diving. Selected for the British Olympic diving team in the 1920s, her father refused to allow her to take part on the grounds that women “shouldn’t be exposing themselves”. She practised in crime and family law up until the mid-1950s.

Nellie and Esther Leviansky were two of the very first women solicitors. They were the daughters of Hampstead solicitor William Leviansky, who also had two sons, both of whom died in the First World War.

William brought his daughters into the family firm as articled clerks. Both qualified in 1926 and ultimately became partners.

The first woman to practise in mandatory Palestine was Rosa Ginsberg (Ginossar), who was born in 1890 in Gomel, Russia. She grew up in a strongly Zionist home. Her father was a friend of Asher Ginsberg, who wrote under the name Ahad Ha’am.

She married his son, Shlomo. They moved to Paris, where Rosa studied law and in 1922 Shlomo and Rosa immigrated to Palestine where Rosa commenced an eight-year battle with the British mandatory authorities to allow her to qualify.

Refused a licence to practice, she was told that an advocate had to be “a person” — that is, a male person — and the words orekh din (the Hebrew term for “lawyer”) referred strictly to males.

Finally, in 1930, Rosa Ginsberg received her licence from the Chief Justice, who noted that the right of women to serve as lawyers in Palestine was a direct result of her struggle.

During the Mandate she worked for the welfare of women. After the establishment of Israel she defended cases brought by the Mandate authorities against “illegal” immigrants. She managed to obtain aliyah certificates for hundreds of refugees.

She continued to work at her legal practice until 1949 when her husband was appointed as Israel’s ambassador to Italy, when the couple changed their name from Ginsberg to Ginossar.

Despite her long and arduous journey to acceptance, Rosa was pipped at the post by Freda Slutzkin, a 26-year-old Australian, who was admitted to the Palestine Bar only a few weeks before Rosa. Freda took her law degree at the Jerusalem School of Law, part of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

Her fellow (male) students translated for her and taught her Hebrew. She graduated with flying colours.

On marriage, she emigrated to the USA where, in 1943, she received a second law degree and was admitted to the New York Bar. She continued to practise, largely in the field of criminal defence work, taking pro bono cases involving young offenders, while becoming a distinguished and successful painter in New York.

Rose Heilbron, the most celebrated lawyer of her time, was the first woman to win a scholarship to Gray’s Inn, the first woman to be appointed a KC, the first to lead in a murder case, the first woman recorder, the first woman to sit as a judge at the Old Bailey and the first woman Treasurer of Gray’s Inn.

Born in Liverpool, her father had a boarding house for immigrant refugees. He took over a small hotel in which his daughters were expected to help, but Rose’s mother insisted that she study and had elocution lessons.

Rose graduated with first-class honours in law from Liverpool University in 1935. Two years later she was called to the Bar, joining the northern circuit, of which she would become leader in 1973.

Her meteoric rise after the War proved that she was head and shoulders above most of her (male) contemporaries. A Liverpool journalist of the time recalls, “She got up there by sheer hard work and cleverness.”

By 1946, Rose had appeared in 10 murder trials. In 1949, at the age of 34, she was made one of the first two women King’s Counsel (KC). She became the first woman to lead in an English murder case and defended a man accused of murdering his mistress in his office. After the trial a fan wrote, “Dear lady, you can’t go around persuading juries that men are entitled to strangle their lady friends.”

She was appointed as a judge at the Old Bailey in January 1972 and in October 1974 became only the second woman to be appointed a high court judge.
Myrella Cohen read law at Manchester.

She was called to the Bar at Gray’s Inn in 1950. She married Colonel Mordaunt Cohen, a solicitor, in 1953 and was the first woman to be taken on as a tenant in chambers in Newcastle.

With two young children, she worked part-time at the Bar for eight years. In 1970 she took silk, only the second Jewish woman to do so following Rose Heilbron. In 1971 she was appointed Recorder of Hull. The following year she was appointed a circuit judge and deputy High Court judge in the Family Division. She had a formidable reputation as a “no-nonsense” judge in criminal cases.

Strictly observant, she was a firm believer in women’s education and careers, and castigated the traditional attitude that pushed women into early marriage and tied them to the home.

Judge Cohen sat at the Old Bailey and at Harrow Crown Court, where a fellow judge was Her Honour Dawn Freedman, who later co-operated with her in her work on pre-nuptial agreements and the problem of the aguna (“chained woman”) whose husband has refused to give her a “get” (a Jewish divorce).

When she retired in 1995, Myrella Cohen was the longest-serving woman judge and longest serving Jewish judge.