Sam Gerson, Ph.D. is a founder and Past-President of the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California (PINC) where he is currently on the faculty and serves as a Training and Supervising Analyst. Dr. Gerson is an Associate Editor of Psychoanalytic Dialogues, and an Editor for Studies in Gender and Sexuality and the Psychoanalytic Quarterly. In 2007 he received the "Elise M. Hayman Award for the Study of Genocide and the Holocaust" from the International Psychoanalytic Association for his paper entitled "When the Third is Dead: Memory, Mourning and Witnessing in the Aftermath of the Holocaust"; this paper was published in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis in 2009. This year at the IPA Congress in Prague he presented his current work entitled "'Mourning and Melancholia' After the Holocaust: A Psychoanalytic Exploration of the Suicides of Jean Amery, Paul Celan, and Primo Levi". In addition to his research and writing about massive trauma, Dr. Gerson's work covers a variety of aspects of psychopathology; his most recent published paper is entitled "Hysteria and Humiliation" and appeared in Psychoanalytic Dialogues in October, 2011 Tribeca.  Recipient of the Hayman Award given by the International Psychoanalytic Association for my writing about the Holocaust, Also, that I am an illegal immigrant to the US, having been born in a DP camp in Germany and came to the US with a false name and visa due to restrictions on Jewish immigration after WW II.

Ana Lehrhaupt was born in Uruguay. Her grandparents were Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe who arrived in the early 1900’s. In Uruguay Ana earned a degree in Psychology from the Universidad de la República and was in private practice before moving internationally. She lived and worked in Argentina, France and later moved to the US with her husband and three children. She settled in Texas where she obtained a Master of Arts in Latin American Studies focused in cultural anthropology and migration from the University of Texas at Austin and later a Master’s in Social Work from the University of Houston. Ana lives in Houston where she is a psychotherapist in private practice and adjunct faculty at the Center for Psychoanalytical Studies. Ana is the Founder of I Wish Everybody Knew®, a pro-bono program to listen, document and share immigrant and refugee life stories. Tribeca

Dr. Anna Balas is Associate Professor of Clinical Psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College and a Training & Supervising Analyst at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute. She has had a private adult and child psychiatry practice in Manhattan for over 35 years. Dr. Balas is a Distinguished Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association as of 2018. She has co-taught a class at the New York Psychoanalytic Society on Psychic Trauma for many years and in prior years has taught classes on The Transgenerational Transmission of Trauma, The Self and Narcissism, Universal Fantasies, and Latency and Preadolescence. Tribeca

Rabbi Stephen Leon, Rabbi Emeritus of B'nai Zion of El Paso, and founder of the Anousim Center, has been working with crypto-Jewish families looking to explore their Jewish roots for over 30 years. His life work has included letting the world know about the different, intersecting lines of the Sephardic diaspora. Rabbi Leon has written a book on his work " The Third Commandment and the Return of the Anusim, a Rabbi's Memoir of an Incredible People".

·   Genealogist and Global Speaker on DNA

·   Pioneered  a method to trace Jewish Lineages to the 1400s

·   Past President of the Society for Crypto Judaic Studies at Colorado State University

·   Past President of the Society of Jewish Genealogy of Greater Miami

·   President of Tarbut Sefarad Fermoselle in Barcelona

• Current Director of Bnei Anusim for Kulanu.org for Community Outreach
• Director of Education to the Bnei Anusim of Latin America and coordinator for these isolated communities .

·   Author of My 15 Grandmothers, How I found my 15 Grandmothers, Pyre to Fire and The Recipes of my 15 Grandmothers all available on Amazon in English and Spanish

·   Some of the books have been translated to Hebrew, Yiddish and Farsi

·   Speaker at the Knesset (Parliament in Israel)

·   Speaker at the Press Box at the EU Parliament in Brussels

·   Spoken Internationally in Spain, Portugal, Guatemala, Ecuador, Uruguay, Denmark, Argentina and many more countries

·   Winner of the 2015 and 2018 and 2020 Latino Author Book Award

·   Winner of the Literary Titan Silver award for the book, Pyre to Fire and 2019  for the Best seller Recipes of My 15 Grandmothers,Winner of the 2020 Latino Author Award for the Recipes of the 15 Grandmothers

·   Recipient of a Genealogy Award from the State of Florida as well as from the International Association of Jewish Genealogists for her extensive work

·   Recipient of the High honor of the Medal of the Four Sephardic Synagogues from Jerusalem

David Graizbord is a historian of early modern and modern Jews. To date his research has focused mostly on the Western Sephardi Diaspora of the seventeenth century. In particular, Graizbord's writing approaches questions of religious, social, and political identity as these questions shaped the lives of so-called "New Christians" or "conversos" from the Iberian Peninsula who became Jews in exile.  He has also written about Judeophobia and the culture of the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions; marginality and dissidence in Jewish and Ibero-Catholic societies of the seventeenth century; ethnicity and religion among Sephardim from medieval times to the 1700s; and converso trading networks in the Atlantic. More recently he has published research on Jewish ethnic identity and Zionism among American Jews. His book, The New Zionists: Young American Jews, Jewish National Identity, and Israel, was issued by Rowman & Littlefield in 2020.  Graizbord teaches undergraduate courses on Jewish civilization, medieval and early modern Jewish history, modern Jewish history, Jewish mysticism (its history and principal phenomena), the Spanish Inquisition, and, occasionally, the history of Antisemitism.  His repertoire of graduate courses--offered primarily to students in the History Department's Division for Late Medieval and Reformation Studies--focuses on early modern Jewish history and Ibero-Catholic history.  Graizbord serves as Program Leader of the UofA's faculty-led Summer Study Abroad Program, "Arizona in Israel."  

Adam is a frequent lecturer on genealogical subjects at conferences all over the world, is Managing Editor of AvotaynuOnline.com, and was National Co-Chair of the IAJGS 2017 conference in Orlando. A strategic planner by profession, he has led numerous boards and commissions pertaining to municipal planning and finance, Jewish education, and scientific research in Israel.