Dr. Ruth

Westheimer was born Karola Ruth Siegel on June 4, 1928, in Wiesenfeld (near Karlstadt am Main), Germany, the only child of Orthodox Jews Irma (née Hanauer), a housekeeper and Julius Siegel, a notions wholesaler and son of the family for whom Irma worked. She was given an early grounding in Judaism by her father, who took her regularly to the synagogue in Frankfurt, where they lived. In January 1939, she was sent to an orphanage in Switzerland by her mother and grandmother as part of the Kindertransport after her father had been taken by the Nazis. She stopped receiving her parents\' letters in September 1941. In 1945, Westheimer learned that her parents had been killed in the Holocaust, possibly at the Auschwitz concentration camp.\n', '

Westheimer decided to emigrate to British-controlled Mandatory Palestine. There, at 17, she "first had sexual intercourse on a starry night, in a hayst…