JGS, Inc. Executive Council Biographies
Jane Rosen Berenbeim, immediate past President, is a consultant to non-profit organizations. She worked for more than 25 years as a Development Officer for New York City social service, educational, healthcare, and cultural institutions, including Columbia University, Mount Sinai Medical Center, and Jewish Board of Family and Children's Services. In earlier incarnations, she taught History and managed a financial planning service. She has been researching her family history for nearly fifteen years and served as Fundraising Chair of the 2006 IAJGS Conference.
Lynn Diamond, Vice President Communications, is a retired attorney with a previous career in the jewelry industry as a magazine editor and marketing executive, and has a B.A. in Linguistics from Cornell University. She currently is associate director of a health-focused non-profit organization, Plant Powered Metro New York. Lynn has been researching her family’s history for more than 30 years, ever since an offhand comment from a great aunt about the family’s town of origin propelled her to the NY Public Library’s map room – long before the internet – to find its location in Eastern Europe. Her own focus is on Belarus and Lithuania, and she branches out her areas of research to as many of her cousins as she can interest in the subject of genealogy.
Stewart Driller, Treasurer, is an electrical engineer who retired from Con Edison ten years ago, when an interest in New York City history and the Lower East Side raised questions about his family's origins. Since then he has been researching his family in the Lublin area of Poland and northern Galicia. Stew is also a volunteer at the Genealogy Institute and Conservation Lab at the Center for Jewish History.
Elise Eisenberg is a Dentist, Adjunct Clinical Professor and Senior Director of Informatics at NYU College of Dentistry where she directs an academic technology area. She has several publications and has presented many times at national Dental Education meetings. She has also presented at Apple’s Worldwide Developer conference in 2009. Elise has served as a member on the American Dental Education Association William J. Gies Foundation Board of Trustees and is Board President of her Co-Op. Elise’s interest in genealogy began as a child, drawing her first family trees with both sets of grandparents and she has been actively researching her family for the last 15 years. She was a session manager for the three IAJGS Virtual Annual Conferences (2020-2022). Elise enjoys exploring and learning new technologies and photography.
Joy Kestenbaum, Vice President Programming, is an art and architectural historian and librarian, who served as chair of the New York Metropolitan Chapter of the Art Libraries Society of North America. She has been on the teaching and library faculty of Queens College (CUNY), Pratt Institute, New York Institute of Technology, and Purchase College (SUNY), and was also Director of the Gimbel Art and Design Library at The New School. A consulting historian for numerous award-winning preservation projects, she has also lectured widely on Jewish architects and synagogue architecture. Her research on Henry Fernbach led to her rediscovery, in the 1980s, of his original nineteenth-century architectural drawings for New York’s Central Synagogue, which proved to be an invaluable contribution to the building’s restoration after a severe fire in 1998. She credits her interest in family history to meeting many of her older immigrant relatives at a very young age and to her grandmother, who requested that she visit her great-grandmother’s grave in London while studying abroad. She has researched members of her extended family who lived in the United States, Canada, England, Argentina and Palestine/Israel, in addition to her roots in Western Galicia and the Grodno/Bialystok region. In 2010, she traveled throughout eastern Poland, conducting archival research and visiting ancestral towns. She created the JewishGen KehilaLinks web pages on Narewka and Krzywcza, both now in Poland, and assists others with their genealogical research.
Bob Kosovsky is Curator of Rare Books and Manuscripts for the Music Division of the New York Public Library; he is also a teacher of music theory at Mannes College, the New School for Music. Bob received his undergraduate degree from Mannes, a Masters Degree from Queens College, a Masters in Library Science from Columbia University, and a Ph.D. in music theory from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Though interested in genealogy since he was a teen, Bob began working on serious genealogical research in the early 1990s when several people contacted him, wondering if they were related (subsequent research revealed that they were). His research focuses on Belarus (Slutsk in particular) and Poland, and he is also involved in a one-name research involving his surname.
Jeffrey Levin is an attorney and the Scarsdale Town Justice. Justice Levin has had a lifetime passion devoted to learning about the roots and stories of his extended family and of the Jewish immigrant experience in America. He is a knowledgeable researcher with roots in Vienna, Galicia and Lithuania. Among his diverse interests, he has served as a volunteer with many civic and political organizations. Justice Levin is the current president of the New Rochelle Bar Association. He is a contributing reporter to his local hometown newspaper and he has written notes for Dorot. As a member of the JGS executive council, he has encouraged other researchers’ interest in their families’ histories. He particularly has an interest in the preservation of family documents and photographs for the enjoyment and knowledge of future generations. Through the Internet and emails he has helped many JGS members with their research.
Michael Levine is a Systems Analyst in the telephone industry. He started researching his family when he was in high school. He resumed his search when he found that he could combine his interest in genealogy with his interest in computers. Michael led an effort to transliterate revision lists from the Borisov District of Belarus, whence his family originates.
Hadassah Lipsius is the 2020 recipient of the IAJGS Lifetime Achievement award. She was co-chair of the 42nd and 26th IAJGS International Conference on Jewish Genealogy and the Program Chair for the 2021 and 2022 IAJGS Conferences. She is a board and executive committee member of Jewish Records Indexing-Poland and the Database Manager for the Warszawa Research Group. Hadassah has traveled many times to Eastern Europe to pursue her family research. Das takes pride that her family were city dwellers (Warszawa and St. Petersburg) for over 240 years.
Harriet Glickman Mayer has been a member of the Executive Council since 2012 and served as Vice President Communications from 2012 through 2019. She has volunteered on many indexing projects with the JewishGen Online Worldwide Burial Register (JOWBR) and the Italian Genealogical Group’s Italiangen and with the New York Genealogical & Biographical Society (NYG&B). A retired librarian who enjoys mysteries and puzzles, she has been researching her family for more than 20 years. She began with trying to figure out some interesting cousin marriages in her Jewish families in Belarus and Ukraine and progressed from there when given a trove of documents going back many generations to her husband’s German-Jewish family. She has traveled extensively in Germany and communicates with family members in several countries.
Phyllis Rosner retired after a 35-year career that included project management in both information systems and corporate audit. She has a B.A. in German from the University of Pennsylvania and an M.A. from NYU and spent a year in Munich as a DAAD graduate fellow. Following her retirement, she received TESOL certification and designed and taught Business English and other courses for adults. Phyllis began her genealogical research about 2012 with very low expectations. Her parents having fled Nazi Germany, she'd been brought up in the mistaken belief that "all the Jewish records were destroyed". In fact, she has been able to trace both sides of her family back to late-18th century Galicia, and is continually discovering modern-day family as well, in great part thanks to the wealth of 21st century resources.
Howard Rotblatt, Secretary, has been a bank examiner for more than 20 years. Prior to that, he had been an assistant nursing home administrator at several health care facilities in the New York City area. The son of a Holocaust survivor, he has been researching his family history from the Lodz area of Poland for the past ten years.
Rebecca Schaeffer-Moldovan is a graduate student in Jewish History at Touro College. Currently, she holds the position of Director at the American Friends of POLIN Museum. Past professional positions have been at Museum of Jewish Heritage, JewishGen, The Jewish Foundation for the Righteous, The Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, and Chai Lifeline. Rebecca is on the board of Kosher Clothing, Inc. and was the archivist for the Friedman Society. She has also taught Jewish Studies, Hebrew, history of Jewish holidays and Jewish ritual objects in school settings and virtual. Rebecca received her Bachelor’s Degree in Marketing from Fashion Institute of Technology and a Certificate in Non-Profit Management from The City University of New York. Genealogy touches many aspects of her life as a collector of Judaica and Hebraica and as an historian.
Debra Silber is a recently retired Justice of the Supreme Court in Brooklyn, N.Y. Befre her election in 1997, she was in private practicefor fourteen years, where she focused on real estate, wills, and estates. Debra has served on the boards of many organizations. She served on the board of her Brooklyn synagogue, Kolot Chayeinu, from 2003-2006. At the present time, she is a member of the board of directors of the New York Women Judges Association, and of the board of the International Association of LGBTQ+ Judges. She is a graduate of the University of California Law School, San Francisco [formerly known as Hastings College of the Law] (1982) and New York University. She has two grown children and lives in Brooklyn.
Debra has been researching her family history for about ten years. She has met a number of far-flung and fascinating second cousins in the process. In 2018, she visited Iasi, Galati and Bucharest, Romania to experience the places where her maternal family came from.
Steve Stein, President and Webmaster, is a retired software professional and manager with more than 45 years in the telecommunications industry. He has been researching his own and his wife's genealogies for more than 35 years, whose origins include Lithuania, Belarus, Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Ukraine and Romania. He has volunteered for H-SIG and
JOWBR, is currently coordinating research projects and the KehilaLinks page related to Nyasvizh, Belarus, and hopes to start one for Kupel, Ukraine in the near future. He has served as president both of the local day school and his synagogue.
Richard Werbin Vice President Membership, now retired, served for more than 20 years as VP in Computer Systems Architecture at Prudential Financial and Chase Manhattan Bank. He was active in application development plus data analysis and worked with data center server administrators. He was an officer and webmaster for the NY chapter of the Institute for Operations Research and Management Sciences (INFORMS). Richard holds a PhD in Physics from Columbia University. His grandparents came from Poland and the Ukraine in the early years of the 20th century. His wife Susan’s family is from Romania and Poland. According to an autosomal DNA analysis, they are 5th cousins.