Dultzin is the daughter of Arieh Dulzin, a Zionist activist from Minsk in the Russian Empire and Soviet Union (now Belarus) who emigrated to Mexico in 1928, and to Israel in 1956.[5] Her mother was Fredzia Kessler, an oil painter from Warsaw, Poland, who had also emigrated to Mexico as a child in 1929.[6] She was born in Monterrey in 1945,[3] and grew up with her mother after her father left Mexico.[7]
As a high school student and later at UNAM, she loved mathematics but struggled with physics. Nevertheless, she completed a degree in physics in order to aim for a career in astronomy. Her anti-American political stance, and the influence of Guillermo Haro, persuaded her to continue her studies in the Soviet Union, where she went next with the support of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.[2] She earned a master's degree in astrophysics at Moscow State University,[4] working with Yakov Zeldovich, but for personal reasons returned to Mexico without completing a doctorate, at that time taking a position as a researcher at UNAM.[2]
At the suggestion of a colleague in a sabbatical visit to Paris, she compiled a doctoral thesis based on her existing published work,[2] and defended it at the Sorbonne University in 1986. Her dissertation was Spectrophotometrie des noyaux actifs des galaxies [Spectrophotometry of active galactic nuclei], directed by Jean Heyvaerts.[8][9]
