About Us
Liz is a retired veteran educator for the Elk Grove Unified School District. She helped create Sacramento’s Shalom School and has taught every grade level from preschool to graduate school. Liz, together with her mother, survived Nazi persecution by escaping from a ghetto in Poland. They walked from Poland across Czechoslovakia to Hungary where they hid until the end of the war. Liz has shared her story with students and teachers hoping to promote understanding of the Holocaust and tolerance.
Iris is a retired employee of Sacramento County and served as Administrative Services Officer for the County Retirement System. She was a member of the Board of Mosaic Law Congregation; is a Life Member of Hadassah and the National Council of Jewish Women and worked for the Bureau of Jewish Education, Shalom Preschool and Shalom School in their early days.
Jeff Winston
treasurer
Jeff is retired from the California State Auditor’s office, is past treasurer of Mosaic Law Congregation and currently controller for JIL Design Group and treasurer for the Captain Joseph House Foundation of Port Angeles, Washington, serving Families of the Fallen.
Naomi Igra
BOARD MEMBER
Naomi is an attorney, the daughter of Liz Igra, and graduated from Shalom School. As the daughter of a Holocaust survivor, she is keenly aware of the need to pass Holocaust education from one generation to the next.
Leah Ezray
Board Member
A retired school teacher who taught grades K-8. She is especially interested in Holocaust education for the earlier grades.
Elizabeth Steele
board member
Elizabeth participated in the Fullbright-Hayes Seminar in Rwanda 2004: Culture, Ethnicity, National Reconciliation and Development in Post-Genocide Rwanda. She is a middle school teacher in the Elk Grove Unified School District and has experience in teacher training.
Jody is an eighth grade teacher for the Sacramento Unified School District. She is a member of the 2nd Generation Group and a regularly speaks to children's groups about the Holocaust.
Dawniell Black
ADVISORY BOARD
Program Specialist: History/Social Science, Physical Education, and Service Learning, Elk Grove Unified School District. Dawniell taught history/social science for 10 years at Franklin High School and worked to develop and implement curriculum that not only informed students about the historical aspects of genocide, but helped them to understand the role they can play in preventing these atrocities from occurring again. Dawniell has participated in a number of CVHEN programs as a teacher and assisted in the facilitation of a workshop series for teachers in the Elk Grove Unified School district on Holocaust.
Matt Clausen
ADVISORY BOARD
Matt is an attorney who contributes his expertise in the law of non-profit organizations to CVHEN.
Dr. Jennifer
Craig-Norton
ADVISORY BOARD
Dr Jennifer Craig-Norton taught AP European and Art History, World History and English in Amador County for twenty years, developing a Holocaust and Genocide Studies elective in 2006. She always had an interest in the Holocaust, becoming a Museum Teacher Fellow with the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in 1999, and working as an outreach educator for the museum until 2013, conducting numerous workshops in both the western US and Romania. Jennifer received two Fulbright scholarships to Poland - a Fulbright-Hayes summer grant in 2009 and a Fulbright English Teaching fellowship for the 2009-2010 academic year during which she taught at the Universityof Gdansk. Jennifer obtained Master’s degree in history from California State University, Sacramento with a thesis on the the history and memory of the Kindertransport, graduating in 2010. In 2011, Jennifer relocated to the UK, where she began a PhD programme in history at the University of Southampton, continuing her research on child refugees from fascism. She graduated in 2014, and her dissertation, ‘Contesting Memory: New Perspectives on the Kindertransport’ was based on a set of unknown case files concerning children brought to the UK from Poland that she discovered in the archives there. In 2013 she received a Saul Kagan Claims Conference Fellowship in Advanced Shoah Studies and in 2015, she was awarded a prestigious three year British Academy of the Humanities and Social Sciences Postdoctoral Fellowship. Her project, which is being undertaken along with teaching at the University of Southampton, is to research the lives of over 20,000 Jewish women refugees who came to the UK in 1933-1939 as domestic servants and nurses. She is an assistant editor of the journal Patterns of Prejudice and is currently working on the manuscript of her first book on the Kindertransport.
Leslie Fried
Kuperstein
ADVISORY BOARD
Leslie taught 6th grade at Shalom School and has taught the Holocaust at 6th and 8th grade levels. She created age appropriate approaches to the subject at elementary and middle school levels and at Camp Tel-Yehudah. Leslie often serves as a Holocaust education resource for local schools. She is currently teaching adult education for the Hebrew University’s Melton programs in the Sacramento region.
Kenzie graduated from the Elk Grove School District in 2022 and is currently pursuing her Bachelors degree in English in hopes to teach at the high school level. She has a strong proficiency in Holocaust media and propaganda, and helps to create and facilitate projects such as workshops, presentations, and community events for CVHEN.