The Honorable Rya W. Zobel, Senior United States District Court Judge of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts Boston, MA
Nominated by President Jimmy Carter in 1979, the Honorable Rya Zobel became the first woman to be named to the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts, taking senior status in 2014.
As a child, Rya Zobel grew up in Nazi Germany. She was born in 1931, the first child of Paul Wiechart, a German who worked for a printing and publishing company, and his Hungarian wife, Elsie. In 1945, Russian troops arrested Zobel’s father, and she never saw him again. As he was being taken away, he tasked Zobel to take care of her mother and younger brother. A few hours later, soldiers took her mother away. She spent 10 years in Russian prisons and prison camps. Friends helped the two children and, when relatives who lived in what had become West Germany learned what happened, they arranged for the children to be brought to their aunt’s home in Coburg.
When their two Hungarian American uncles, who lived in New York, received word of these events, the older one hurried to Germany to help. He quickly began the process of bringing the children to the United States. It was not seamless, but on January 3, 1947, the children embarked on the SS Ernie Pyle for the passage to the United States. The former troop ship was, on this occasion, filled with refugees. It was a stormy thirteen-day voyage, but when the ship arrived in New York harbor all the passengers were on deck to salute the Statue of Liberty. To this day, Zobel remembers being greeted by the Statue of Liberty upon her entry into the United States.
Zobel and her brother lived with their uncle and his family on Long Island and were immediately enrolled in school. They also had to speak only English at home. After two-and-a-half years, Zobel had mastered the English language, graduated from high school, and enrolled in Radcliffe College. She was one of a few women to graduate Harvard Law School in 1956. She was among the first women to become partners in a major Boston law firm, Goodwin, Procter & Hoar. In 1979 she became the first woman appointed an Article III judge to any court in the First Circuit, and later, the first woman Director of the Federal Judicial Center, established by Congress in 1967, in Washington, DC. In September, 2020, Zobel received the Edward J. Devitt Distinguished Service to Justice Award, the first-ever woman District Judge to win the award.
Although Zobel became an American citizen over 70 years ago, she still feels the pride of citizenship that she articulates when she administers the oath of allegiance to new immigrants during naturalization ceremonies. She encourages new citizens to “maintain vigilance, preserve the liberty of this country, and participate in the government.” Since the new citizens now “have a stake in the self-government of this country,” she urges them to exercise their right to vote.