The World's Foremost Sex Therapist Was a Holocaust Survivor and Former Sniper

Before beloved sex therapist Dr. Ruth Westheimer began teaching couples how best to shoot their shot, she was taking some shots of her own. As a sniper with the Haganah, forerunner to the modern-day Israel Defense Forces (IDF), she was so accurate, she could put five rounds in the center of a target at will.

Although Westheimer --  who died on July 12, 2024, at age 96 -- would never kill anyone in combat, had she seen action, she would have needed that kind of skill. The Haganah was the main military force for the Jewish people in Palestine before World War II. After the war, it was called on to establish the modern-day Jewish state.

After World War I, some former possessions of Germany, Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire (which lost the war) were carved up and doled out to the winners. The British controlled the former Ottoman territory of Palestine, which encompasses what is today Israel, the West Bank and parts of Jordan. The mandate ended following World War II, when the British withdrew.

The Jewish people of this region had an underground security force of their own since the early 1900s, but when the British came in, they began forming paramilitary groups. And they were necessary. Throughout the interwar years, Jewish settlers in the mandated area were subject to violence, Arab riots and even a full-on Arab rebellion.

One of these paramilitary groups was the Haganah, which was also the largest and was under control of the Jewish leadership in Mandatory Palestine. During World War II, the unrest in the area calmed down but flared up as the Jewish people revolted against British rule toward the end of the war.

Before the war broke out, 10-year-old Karola Ruth Siegel, the daughter of an Orthodox Jewish couple, was shipped to Switzerland for her own safety. Her father had been sent to the Dachau concentration camp after the infamous Kristallnacht pogrom of 1938. While she was living in an orphanage there, her mother disappeared and her father was killed at Auschwitz.

When the war ended, Karola moved to Palestine and began using her middle name. While living in Jerusalem in 1948, she joined the Haganah, which was in the middle of the insurgency. The group trained her to be a scout and sniper, because she stood just over 4½ feet tall. She joined just in time to serve in the Israeli War of Independence, which began that same year.

Almost as soon as Britain announced its complete withdrawal from Palestine, Arabs and Jews began fighting for control of the region. Arab forces from Iraq, Egypt, Syria and Transjordan (now Jordan) invaded Palestine, reinforced Arab areas and attacked Jewish ones. In response, the new Israeli government merged the paramilitary groups into the Israel Defense Forces and counterattacked.

The future Dr. Ruth was stationed in Jerusalem in June 1948. The Jordanians had cut off supplies to the city, where some of the heaviest fighting of the war was taking place. House-to-house fighting raged through the quarters of the city as the Arabs launched an estimated 10,000 artillery and mortar shells per day at the Israelis.

One of these mortars hit her unit's barracks, killing two and seriously wounding Ruth before she ever fired a round of her own. She was temporarily paralyzed and nearly lost both feet. As Israel began to turn the tide and win its war for survival, the future Dr. Ruth was relearning how to walk.

Despite not having a formal high school education due to the Holocaust, Ruth still studied early childhood education in Israel. After the 1948 war, she moved to France to study psychology at the Sorbonne, where she finished her undergraduate degree. Before long, she was teaching there.

In 1956, she immigrated to New York City, where she worked as a maid while she earned a master's degree in sociology from the New School. She later married Manfred Westheimer, earned her doctorate and trained as a sex therapist. In 1980, her call-in radio show, "Sexually Speaking," debuted on the NYC radio station WYNY-FM.

Its exploding popularity led to books, television shows and Dr. Ruth's worldwide popularity as one of the world's most outspoken, but trusted voices in healthy sexuality.

-- Blake Stilwell can be reached at blake.stilwell@military.com. He can also be found on Twitter @blakestilwell or on LinkedIn.

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