Charlotte Anna Tejessy Sissman, formerly of New York City and Princeton, N.J. died in Sleepy Hollow, New York on April 27, 2022. The cause was a severe blood infection complicating senile dementia.
She was born near Berlin, Germany, to Fritz and Grete Tejessy on April 28, 1926. Her father, a life-long public opponent of the National Socialist Party, was forced to flee Germany to avoid persecution by the Nazis soon after they came to power in 1933. As punishment for her father, Charlotte and her mother and sister were declared stateless residents. Her teenage years included desertion from the German army after being drafted in 1945, and work for an American news-radio company as an observer and translator at the postwar Nuremberg trials.
Ms. Tejessy Sissman was able to emigrate to the United States in 1947. She graduated from Radcliffe College and the Simmons School of Social Work in Boston. Subsequently she worked as a psychiatric social worker and teacher in Boston, first at the Massachusetts General Hospital and then at the Massachusetts Memorial Hospital. In 1962 she moved to New York City, where she became Director of Postgraduate Training for Social Workers at the Jewish Board of Guardians and established a private practice in psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapy.
Ms. Tejessy married Norman J. Sissman in 1975, and they lived in Princeton, New Jersey where she continued her private practice until she retired in 2005. The couple then moved to a retirement community, Kendal on Hudson, in Sleepy Hollow, New York, where she lived until her death. She was an effective and compassionate psychotherapist, particularly for children, a devoted mother, and close friend to many. She had a strong interest in the arts, particularly classical music and European painters and sculptors.
She is survived by her husband, Norman J. Sissman; her son, Oliver J. Sissman in New Jersey; her stepdaughter, Brooke Roseberry in St. Louis; her brother, Wolfgang Tejessy, and his family in Geneva, Switzerland; and her niece, Inge Scholz-Strasser, and her family in Vienna, Austria. Burial is private. Memorial donations to one’s favorite charity, in her memory, are welcome.