Ellen Holtzman is a Rockland County attorney who has dedicated her legal practice to family and matrimonial law at the Law Office of Ellen B. Holtzman since 1989. Based in Rockland’s county seat, New City, she has established an impressive record of results throughout New York State in the Family Courts, Supreme Courts, and the Appellate Division and is well known for representing both men and women in complex matrimonial and child custody cases. A powerful advocate, she has argued and prevailed in a number of precedent-setting appeals in the First and Second Departments of the Supreme Court of the State of New York. Ms. Holtzman has also achieved favorable outcomes for clients in complex international child custody cases, specifically in Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction cases, which are heard in the federal courts.
While leading a team of top professionals in her law offices, Ms. Holtzman also makes time to serve as Director of Legal Training at the Washington Square Institute’s program for Psychotherapy and Mental Health Family Forensics. She has shared her expertise on distinguished panels such as the American Psychoanalytic Association’s Annual Conference in its examination of “The Intersection Between Legal, Psychological, and Judicial Concepts of Best Interests of the Child” and the New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis on “The Best Interests of the Child Standard: The Interface between Legal, Judicial, and Psychoanalytic Perspectives.” For the Institute, she also moderated a multi-disciplinary seminar including judges, lawyers, and mental health professionals on “The Loss of a Parent to the Child, and the Loss of the Child to a Parent: An Investigation of Relocation, Parental Alienation, and Parental Child Abduction.” For a recent program addressing “The Traumatic Impact of the Dissolution of the Family” sponsored by the Institute for Contemporary Psychotherapy and the New York Women’s Bar Association, Ms. Holtzman’s focus was on mitigating the stress of family dissolution. Ms. Holtzman has also been a frequent lecturer at Continuing Legal Education programs for attorneys on matrimonial law and legal ethics.
Ms. Holtzman was appointed a Commissioner of the New York State Commission on Legislative Ethics in 2008 and continues to serve the people of New York in that role. She also served two terms on the Grievance Committee for the Ninth Judicial District, whose members are appointed by the Appellate Divisions of the Supreme Court of the State of New York. The Grievance Committee is charged with the duty to uphold legal ethics and professionalism and protect the public by holding lawyers accountable for misconduct. She is a past president of the Women’s Bar Association of the State of New York (WBASNY), one of the nation’s largest women’s bar associations, and presently serves as president of the WBASNY Foundation.
Ms. Holtzman is a cum laude graduate of the University Heights Campus of New York University and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. She received her J.D. from New York Law School, where she was an Alfred Gross Scholar. A founding member of the Judges and Lawyers Breast Cancer Alert (JACBCA), she is currently a member of its Advisory Board. Throughout her career, Ms. Holtzman has been a zealous advocate for women and children. In 2019, she was an inaugural inductee into the Rockland Women Leaders Hall of Fame, selected by the Center for Safety and Change in honor of her pioneering work in training attorneys to represent survivors of domestic violence in family law and matrimonial proceedings. The Rockland County Women’s Bar Association honored Ms. Holtzman with its highest honor, the Belle Mayer Zeck Award for Promoting Understanding Between the Legal Profession and the Community and Advancing the Status of Women in Society. The Women’s Bar Association of the State of New York presented her with the Joan L. Ellenbogen Founders Award for her contributions to the advancement of law and the legal system. She is co-President of the Reform Temple of Rockland.