THE Dr. Ruth Westheimerthe perky, petite sexologist who became a pop culture figure by encouraging Americans to have sex often, safely and imaginatively, has died at age 96, according to the Washington Post.

Westheimer died Friday at her home in Manhattan, the paper said, citing its publisher.

Dr. Ruth escaped Nazi Germany as a child.

She had said she first learned about sex when she was 10 and found her parents’ “marriage manual” in a locked cupboard.

What she read in those pages led her years later to a career that included international fame, books, educational videos, lectures, a radio show, countless television appearances, a newspaper column, and even a board game, the Good Sex.

Known to the world only by her first name, Dr. Ruth, a woman of only 1.40 height, distinctive German accent and always in a good mood, preached the joy of good sex and, in particular, safe sex.

The woman who would become a sex guru lost her virginity at the age of 17 on a starry night in a kibbutz barn.

Later, in her autobiography, the book All in a lifetime published in 2001, she wrote that when two people are in love, the first experience “can be very pleasant”.

As a fervent supporter of contraception, in the same book she criticized herself for not taking precautions those first few times. She also avoided revealing who her partner was because she maintained friendly relations with him and his wife.

Dr. Ruth herself was the product of an unplanned, out-of-wedlock pregnancy.

Her mother was working as a housekeeper for her father’s family in Frankfurt when she became pregnant. The young couple subsequently married and their child, Carola Ruth Siegel, as was her real name, was born on June 4, 1928.

Orphaned in the Holocaust

Ruth was 10 years old when the Nazis took her father from their home in Frankfurt. Six weeks later, her mother sent her to an orphanage in Switzerland. In 1941 she stopped receiving letters from her parents and later learned that they had been killed in the Holocaust.

At 16, she immigrated to what was then Palestine and joined the Haganah, a Jewish paramilitary organization. “I learned to assemble a gun in the dark and trained as a free-range shooter so I could hit the center of the target every time,” she wrote in a 2010 New York Times op-ed.

In reality, Westheimer never tested her marksmanship against an enemy, but she was injured in a bombing in Jerusalem.

She married an Israeli soldier, they moved to Paris and studied there. They then divorced and she left for New York, remarried, had a daughter and continued her studies. After her second divorce, she married Manfred Westheimer, an engineer whom she met in 1961, had a son, and lived together until Manfred’s death in 1997.

After earning a doctorate in education, Westheimer began working at Planned Parenthood and caught the attention of a radio station with her birth control lectures.

Thus was born a weekly, 15-minute, late-night show, Sexually Speaking, where he took questions from listeners and gave advice on everything: condoms, orgasm, sexual dysfunction, topics very sensitive at the time. Very quickly she gained loyal listeners, thanks to her experience but also, as she said, to her voice and accent which gave her credibility.

She was a regular guest on popular TV shows until she got her own show.

“Heyi am a jewish mother. An outspoken Jewish mother“, he once told People magazine.

In addition to her autobiography, she wrote nearly 40 books, including “Sex for Beginners,” “Sex After 50,” and “The Encyclopedia of Sex.”