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.
Westheimer was born in Germany to a Jewish family. As the Nazis came to power, her parents sent the 10-year-old girl to a school in Switzerland for safety while they remained behind because of her elderly grandmother.
At 17 years of age, she joined the Haganah, and was trained as a sniper.
The Haganah was the main Zionist paramilitary organization that operated for the Yishuv in the British Mandate for Palestine. It was founded in 1920 to defend the Yishuv’s presence in the region, and was formally disbanded in 1948, when it became the core force integrated into the Israel Defense Forces shortly after the Israeli Declaration of Independence.
Formed out of previous existing militias, Haganah’s original purpose was to defend Jewish settlements against Arab attacks; this was the case during the 1920 Nebi Musa riots, the 1921 Jaffa riots, the 1929 Palestine riots, the 1936 Jaffa riots, and the 1936–1939 Arab revolt in Palestine, among others.
The paramilitary was under the control of the Jewish Agency, the official governmental body in charge of Palestine’s Jewish community during the British era.
On her 20th birthday, she was wounded in action by an exploding shell during mortar fire on Jerusalem during the 1947–1949 Israeli War of Independence, and almost lost both feet.
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