In the fall of 2009, the pioneering Jewish genealogist and author, Arthur Kurzweil, assembled an international working group to address this subject. The group hopes to produce its recommendations in a year’s time.

The group is composed of the following members:

Arthur Kurzweil (MLS) is an author, teacher, lecturer and publisher. His many books include On the Road with Rabbi Steinsaltz, Kabbalah for Dummies and The Torah for Dummies, he is best known for the ground-breaking work From Generation to Generation: How to Trace Your Jewish Genealogy and Family History. He resides in New York.

Rabbi Dr. Nachum Amsel (Ph.D. and ordination from Yeshiva University) is the author of The Jewish Encyclopedia of Moral and Ethical Issues. Rabbi Amsel has been a teacher, a school principal, has taught in university and has also taught numerous teachers how to teach more effectively. He has worked in all areas of formal and informal Jewish education and has developed numerous curricula including a methodology how to teach Jewish Values using mass media. He lives in Israel.

Dr. Lawrence J. Epstein (Ph.D., State University of New York at Albany) is an author and teacher. He has written several books on Judaism and Jewish history, including At the Edge of a Dream: The Story of Jewish Immigrants on New York's Lower East Side, 1880-1920. He was a professor of English and Chairperson of the Humanities Division at Suffolk Community College. He lives in New York.

Rony Golan (LL.B, Tel Aviv University) has been a member of the Israel Bar Association since 1986. He heads a law firm located in Ramat Gan, close to the Tel Aviv and Ramat Gan Courts. He is author of a work on Tourism Law and maintains a website dedicated to the legal issues of tourism and travel law in Israel (www.tourism-law.co.il). He currently gives a course on Professional Ethics at the Hebrew University. He lives in Israel.

Karen Rosenfeld Roekard MBA (1975) is an author, editor, and researcher. Her current projects include: (1) “The Utilization of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) in the Recreation of Destroyed Communities” (with Professor Stephen Egbert, University of Kansas); (2) “The Identification of Victims of the Einsatzgruppen from Remaining Communal Records”; and, (3) “The Utilization of the Lviv Archive Tabula Register Collection in Micro-historical Research.” She lives in California.