Dr Ruth Westheimer last interesting Valentine message | Dr Ruth Westheimer has passed away at 96
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Dr. Ruth Westheimer, the Holocaust orphan who rose to become one of the most famous sex therapists in America, a 4-foot-7 celebrity with a big smile and a penchant for tackling the most taboo of subjects with blunt honesty and matronly humor, died Friday at her New York City home, according to her publicist Pierre Lehu.
She died just over a month after her 96th birthday.
"The children of Dr. Ruth K. Westheimer are sad to announce the passing of their mother, the internationally-celebrated sex therapist, author, talk show host, professor, and orphan of the Holocaust," her family said in a statement Saturday.
Ruth Westheimer
Dr. Ruth Westheimer participates in panel discussion in 2019.Willy Sanjuan / Invision / AP
The family will hold a private funeral, Lehu said.
As a 50-something psychiatrist, she found sudden fame on radio, television and in bookstores during the 1980s, fueled by a simple formula: Talking honestly in public about intimate subjects that few others dared to utter even in private.
“I knew that there is a lot of knowledge that is around but doesn’t get to young people,” Westheimer told NBC Nightly News in 2019. “There’s a myth (for example) that women don’t need sex. Nonsense. Of course, they need sex.”
Dr. Ruth Westheimer and Shari Lewis in the 1980s.
Dr. Ruth Westheimer and Shari Lewis in the 1980s. Ralph Dominguez / MediaPunch / AP file
Her cheerful public persona as a celebrity sex therapist belied a painful path to arrive at superstardom. Born Karola Ruth Siegel on June 4, 1928 in Frankfurt, Germany, Westheimer was an only child in a wealthy Orthodox Jewish family. Her father, Julius, was a successful businessman who married her mother, Irma, a helper in the household, after getting her pregnant. By Westheimer’s account, it was an idyllic and protected early childhood.
That would change abruptly with the rise of Hitler and his antisemitic pogroms.
On Nov. 9, 1938, the violence against Jews escalated with Kristallnacht, a rampage across the Jewish neighborhoods of Germany after the assassination of a German diplomat in Paris. The synagogue where the Siegels worshipped was among the temples burned to the ground. A week later, the danger hit even closer to home. Nazi soldiers came to take away Julius Siegel to a labor camp.
“They took my father downstairs and before he went into the truck he turned around and smiled and waved despite the fact that he must have been horrified,” she recalled in the documentary, “Ask Dr. Ruth.”
Worried about their only daughter, the Siegels managed to secure a coveted spot on a kindertransport, a program sending a select group of Jewish children to the safety of a children’s home and orphanage in the Swiss village of Heiden. The plan was to protect Karola until the whole family could emigrate to Palestine or the United States together. Instead, the 10-year-old’s farewell to her mother and paternal grandmother at the train station would mark the last time she would see her family alive.
“My parents actually gave me life twice, once when I was born and once when I was sent to Switzerland,” Westheimer later told NBC Nightly News.
Life at the orphanage was hard: Dr. Ruth wrote in her memoir that the German Jews were forced to do the household chores and take care of the Swiss children. It got even harder when letters from her family stopped arriving in September 1941, a few months after Westheimer’s 13th birthday. She would later discover that is when they were sent to Auschwitz, where they would be murdered.
Once she turned 18, she was no longer eligible to stay at the group home, so she emigrated to Palestine with several other peers from the orphanage, settling in a kibbutz. Warned that fellow Jews would mistrust someone from Germany, she ditched her first name, opting to use her middle one.
“Ruth” was conscripted to be a sniper for the Jewish underground when war broke out after Israel declared its independence in May 1948.
“I was fortunate. I never killed anybody, but I could have if I needed to,” Westheimer told NBC's "TODAY" show in 2015.
Someone else, however, almost killed her. Just weeks into the war, on her 20th birthday, Siegel was severely injured in a bomb blast that left her feet severely damaged and in danger of amputation. She defied the odds and made a full recovery.
In 1950, Siegel accepted a marriage proposal from an Israeli soldier, David Bar-Heim, and accompanied her new husband to France, where he was accepted into medical school. Taking advantage of the opportunity to study psychology at the Sorbonne school in Paris, Ruth gravitated toward the education that had long been denied to her. But Bar-Heim longed to return to Israel, so the
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