ALICE COHN

COHN--Dr. Alice Ginott, a psychologist committed to nurturing empathetic communication, died on February 23, 2015 at her home in Manhattan, age 90. She had suffered a stroke three years earlier, which prevented her from expressing herself in any of the seven languages she spoke. A second stroke ended her life. Burial services and shiva were held privately. Alice was born in Presov, Czechoslovakia to Martin and Pearl Weinberger Grunfeld. Her adoring relationship with her father was a central part of her life, providing the foundation of love that enabled her to express love to others. She was saved from the Holocaust by her mother who, with the aid of a brother who had befriended a US Vice Consul in Prague and another who was already living in New Jersey, arranged for visas for the family to come to the US in November 1938. Had this not happened, she might have joined her Czech girlfriends who, as she later learned, were among the first to be gassed at Auschwitz. Arriving in America as a poor refugee "greener" during the Depression, Alice turned a hard life into a good life. Prevented from pursuing a career as a teacher of English literature at Montclair State Teachers College because of her accent, she transferred to Indiana University Bloomington on a scholarship, participated in the 1953 Kinsey Study, worked to desegregate Bloomington, and found her true calling in psychology. She received a Ph.D. in experimental psychology from the New School for Social Research in 1959. Alice had two daughters with her first husband, Arthur Lasker: Roz Lasker, a physician, and Mimi Kaough, an attorney. In 1969, she married Dr. Haim Ginott, a prominent child psychologist who she met at a yahrzeit memorial celebration for the Yiddish author Sholem Aleichem. The couple worked closely together until Ginott's death from cancer in 1973. In 1986 she married Theodore Cohn, a management consultant who she met in New Delhi at a professional conference. For 40 years, Alice maintained an active practice as a psychotherapist and world- wide lecturer, bringing knowledge, intuition, sensitivity, pragmatism and compassion to her work. She wrote a weekly column on parenting for King Features, published in 70 international newspapers. In 2003, with Dr. H. Wallace Goddard, she revised Ginott's classic, Between Parent and Child, which has sold 250,000 copies in 18 languages. Alice loved to ice skate, ski cross-country, dance, listen to music, and converse. After visiting Auschwitz in 1992, she and her husband established the Alice Field Cohn Chair in Yiddish Studies at Indiana University to foster the continuity of Yiddish. Alice wished to be memorialized in the form of gifts to the Borns Jewish Studies Program (Alice Field Cohn Chair in Yiddish Studies), Indiana University, Goodbody Hall 326, 1011 East 3rd Street, Bloomington, IN 47405. She is survived by her husband Theodore, two daughters, two grandchildren, three step-children and four step-grandchildren.