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Ada Hirsh died Sept. 2, 1985 in her 90th year. Born Sept., 1895, the daughter of a prosperous merchant in Aachen, Germany, she became aware early of the devastating effect of mental illness during the psychosis of her father's second wife. As an only child, she was 19 years old when World War I broke out. She soon became a nurse's aide to help care for the battlefield casualties, then a qualified social worker, then a registered nurse, and, finally, a medical student earning her M.D. degree from the University of Vienna in 1936. In that same year, at the age of 41, she left Austria and emigrated to Palestine; but, after a short time there, she returned to Austria despite the urgings of her family, who remained in Palestine to escape the Nazi persecution.
In 1939, at the age of 44, she managed to escape the Nazis by emigrating to Ecuador, S.A., where she practiced medicine, and then eventually emigrated to New York City. Passing her New York State licensing examination, she practiced general medicine for a short time. Experiencing a deep, inner urge to help the minds and souls of her patients, she enrolled as a candidate at the Karen Horney Institute and became a graduate psychoanalyst. For the next 35 years she devoted herself wholeheartedly to the treatment of her patients and to the training of generations of psychoanalysts at the American Institute for Psychoanalysis.
Her outstanding qualities were her remarkable courage, high spiritual level, flexibility, and her determination to improve her skills towards helping unfortunate people. Her experiences included work at Lenox Hill Hospital with terminal patients of all kinds, attempting to ease their fears about death. In addition to an active private practice, the main investment of her time and energy was as a supervising and training analyst and lecturer at the American Institute for Psychoanalysis.
As her training analysand, I benefitted from her support and remarkable intuition and understanding. Her strength was