The Life of Ayyā Khemā

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Ilse Kussel was born into a wealthy Jewish family in Berlin in 1923, but Nazi persecution shattered her affluent childhood. After Kristallnacht, her parents fled to Shanghai while she escaped to Scotland in 1939, permanently separated from relatives, many of whom perished in the Holocaust. She endured loneliness and discrimination in Glasgow, then rejoined her parents in Shanghai, surviving the Hongkew ghetto during Japanese occupation. She married, worked for the American army, and emigrated to San Francisco in 1949. Feeling a spiritual void, she embarked on global travels to Central and South America, Pakistan and India before embracing Buddhism, becoming ordained as Ayyā Khemā in 1979, founding monasteries, and teaching meditation, especially in Germany, until her death.

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