Dr. Ruth Westheimer was known worldwide as a disarming sex expert and loved by millions, but at her intimate funeral on the Upper West Side on Sunday, she was remembered as a deeply loving mother, grandmother and friend.
The service – which included her daughter and son, all four of her grandchildren and a close friend, Jeffrey Tabak – was humorous in parts, with the eulogies repeatedly touching on common themes: Westheimer’s passion for human relationships, her inimitable accent, her fierce independence and her unwavering love for her family.
“Few people in the world have earned the love of as many people around the world as Ruth,” Rabbi William Lebeau, former dean of the Jewish Theological Seminary and longtime family friend, said at the funeral Sunday at Riverside Memorial Chapel, two days after Westheimer died at age 96.
“She was universally recognized in a world where there is so little universality,” Lebeau said. “She liked to say, ‘It’s good to be Dr. Ruth,’ but she said it without the slightest bit of boasting. She loved being Dr. Ruth because she knew that as Dr. Ruth she could do good. How many lives did she touch with her energy and creativity? How many lives did she make better by the good she brought into this world?”
After singing and reading Psalm 23 (“The Lord is my shepherd…”), Westheimer’s daughter Miriam Westheimer was the first to speak. “Mommy, for so many years, every time we talked, I told you that everything was OK, no matter how bad things were,” she said through tears. “I always tried to downplay situations so you had to worry… but today, even I can’t say everything is OK. Mommy, I’m sorry, but everything is not OK. You’re gone and it’s not OK.”
Miriam continued to talk about the challenges of caring for someone as independent-minded as her mother, including driving her to the hospital after she suffered a mild stroke. On the way to the hospital, Westheimer remembered that she had to teach a class that evening. She told the doctor, “I’m going to be the best, most cooperative patient from now until 4 p.m.” Westheimer kept her word and left promptly at 4 p.m.
Miriam said her mother sent her and her brother to a private school, but spent their summers at a socialist Zionist summer camp.
Westheimer, a fixture in the Washington Heights neighborhood where they lived, was a presence at events across the city. Mother and daughter were known as the “fast couple,” Miriam recalled. “We could get ready in record time to attend any social event she knew of,” she said in her eulogy. “No event, big or small, was to be missed. We ran everywhere. Traffic lights were a nuisance. When I said, ‘Mommy, it says here we can’t walk,’ she would say, ‘It’s okay, we’re not walking, we’re running!'”
Like many of the speakers, Miriam spoke about how Westheimer was constantly on the move, saying she had a “really busy schedule right up until the end.” Miram noted that a play by Mark St. Germain based on her mother’s life, “Becoming Dr. Ruth,” is still being performed in the U.S. and in Hebrew in Israel. A new book by Dr. Ruth – “The Joy of Connections: 100 Ways to Beat Loneliness and Live a Happier and More Meaningful Life” – is coming out this fall.
“The hustle and bustle is dizzying, even now,” she said. “Just as she wanted it.”
Miriam’s younger brother, Joel Westheimer, began his remarks by reflecting on Westheimer’s journey from Frankfurt to Switzerland on a Kindertransport when she was 10 years old. She never saw her parents again and built a life for herself as a kibbutznik and soldier in Israel, as a psychology student in Paris and then as a doctoral student in education in New York. “She nurtured friendships and family ties like a gardener tends his plants,” he said. “Because she had so little family of her own after World War II, she strengthened familiar ties and made new ones wherever she went.”
He also reflected on how people liked to ask him what it was like growing up with America’s best-known sex therapist as a mother. “While it’s true that there were a few books about sex lying around the house and that her work as a sex therapist was talked about from time to time – and I don’t know if anyone mentioned the words penis or vagina in a eulogy, but I just said them to get it over with – the truth is that neither Miriam nor I grew up with the famous Dr. Ruth.”
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Joel went on to explain that Westheimer’s first radio show, “Sexually Speaking,” began on the now-defunct WYNY-FM in 1980, when he was just graduating from high school and his sister was living in Israel. Westheimer was already in his early 50s at the time. “Her eventual fame was just the public recognition of qualities she always had,” he said. “Enthusiasm, drive, a sense of wanting to help people and the world, and her unbridled joy for life and her enthusiasm for people.”
“She took them with her everywhere she went, from Germany to Switzerland, from Switzerland to Israel, from Israel to France and from France to the United States,” Joel said, adding that his mother learned the language wherever she lived to better connect with people.
He also praised Westheimer for being a loving mother, and shared anecdotes like the time he and a friend built a clubhouse in his parents’ bedroom closet. “It sat for months – I have no idea where they put their clothes,” he said.
“Our house was not tidy – that would be an understatement – but it was always alive,” he said. “What the apartment lacked in order was more than made up for in magical moments, energy and joy.”
Westheimer’s son-in-law, Joel Einleger (known in the family as “the other Joel”) and daughter-in-law Barbara Leckie spoke next. “Ruth was kind to everyone,” Einleger said. “Miriam and I often meet people today who can describe a brief conversation with Ruth decades ago as if Ruth had been a close friend.”
Leckie, meanwhile, described the first time she met her future mother-in-law – Westheimer held her hand throughout the meal. “That’s Ruth’s way: She draws people to her, she pulls them in and she holds them,” she said.
Leora Einleger, one of her four grandchildren, gave a moving description of her famous grandmother’s house. “Grandma’s apartment, where she lived for almost 60 years, was her crowded refuge,” she said, using the German diminutive for grandmother. “A place full of pictures and memories of the life she built for herself.”
“Between pictures of my grandma with President Clinton and artwork I did in fourth grade, sits one of the many, many bookshelves in her apartment,” she continued. “Books were an essential part of her personality.”
Einleger, who married Elan Kane last summer after getting engaged on a bench in Uptown’s Fort Tryon Park that Westheimer dedicated to her husband, Fred, who died in 1997, pointed out that although her grandmother was denied a high school education by the Nazis, she read voraciously in the orphanage in Switzerland where she lived. Westheimer later wrote more than 40 books.
She also praised Westheimer for being an excellent grandmother and coming to every single performance of her childhood – including once when she played a lifeless rock in a musical.
“The Statue of Liberty held a special place in her heart,” she said. “Where else could the Holocaust orphan without a high school diploma have started working as a domestic helper and changed the lives of millions of people with her resilience, courage and zest for life?”
“She saw all four of her grandchildren grow up and go to college. She often said it reminded her that Hitler had lost and she had won,” she concluded. “The world was lucky to have my grandma, but I was even luckier to have her as my person.”
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“I want to ask how this 4-foot-10 woman became such a gigantic force,” Lebeau said in his closing remarks. “How could she emerge from a cauldron of cruelty and live as one of the kindest people I have ever known? Dr. Ruth’s story is told in plays, in countless books, articles, her numerous media interviews and appearances. But in every assessment of her life there is a common theme: her resilience.”
