Holocaust Survivor and Sex Expert Dr. Ruth Westheimer Dies at 96

Shiryn Ghermezian

Ruth Westheimer at the 61st Grammy Awards, Los Angeles, California, US, Feb. 10, 2019. Photo: Reuters

Holocaust survivor and renowned sex therapist Dr. Ruth Westheimer died on Friday at her home in New York City at the age of 96. The cause of death is unknown.

“She was restful when she passed away. Her son and daughter were with her and holding her hand at that moment,” her longtime publicist, Pierre Lehu, told PEOPLE magazine. “It was as peacefully as she could possibly go.”

The sexologist, talk show host, and author — known as “Dr. Ruth” — was born Karola Ruth Siegel on June 4, 1928, in Wiesenfeld, Germany. She was the only child of orthodox Jewish parents Julius and Irma Siegel. Her father, Julius, was arrested by the Nazis in 1938. Not long after, her mother and grandmother put her on a train to Switzerland as part of the “kindertransport,” which was an organized effort that transported thousands of Jewish children out of Germany. After the war, she learned that her entire family was murdered by the Nazis, with her father dying in the Auschwitz concentration camp.

Westheimer immigrated to Israel following the war and began going by her middle name, Ruth. She trained to be a sniper for the Haganah, a Zionist paramilitary organization. She later moved to Paris, to study psychology at Sorbonne University, and then New York City.

She earned a master’s degree in sociology and a doctorate in education from Columbia University, and finished her postdoctoral work on human sexuality at the New York University Medical Center. In 1980, she began hosting the live, call-in sex advice radio show “Sexually Speaking,” which lasted ten years and led to other television and radio shows, including “The Dr. Ruth Show.”

The Hulu documentary “Ask Dr. Ruth” premiered in 2019. Westheimer also published a number of books, including “Dr. Ruth’s Guide to Good Sex” and “Sex for Dummies.” She taught at Columbia, Yale, and Princeton, in addition to Hunter College. She was also the inspiration behind the one-woman play, “Becoming Dr. Ruth,” and the board game, Dr. Ruth’s Game of Good Sex.

Westheimer is survived by her son Joel, her daughter Miriam, and four grandchildren. She was married three times. Her third husband, fellow Holocaust survivor Manfred “Fred” Westheimer, died in 1997.

In a 1997 advertisement by the American Jewish Committee that was printed in The New York Times, Westheimer talked about being Jewish and the role it plays in her life.

“The world can learn something valuable from the Jewish experience,” she wrote. “We have been the objects of the most perverse form of human hatred — the attempt to destroy an entire people. But we never permitted that hatred to determine who we are or what we stand for. As Jews, we never forgot that we are called upon by our tradition to repair the world by transforming hatred into love and by teaching and working for justice and peace.”

“And for a Jewish people whose numbers were so decimated, let future generations fulfill the Biblical commandment — one Dr. Ruth especially endorses — ‘be fruitful and multiply,’” she added.