Julian Henri Preisler is an archivist and genealogist in the Eastern Panhandle region of West Virginia. He formerly ran a website about West Virginia Jewish history.

Read an November 2006 commentary from Rabbi Jeffrey Kurtz-Lendner of New Orleans, published in Smartphone & Pocket PC Magazine, about how wireless technology helped him keep in touch with his congregation in the weeks after Katrina.

Sharon Miller is the principal of Ben Gamla Charter School in Hollywood, Fla., the first publicly funded Hebrew-language school in the U.S.

Jack Kugelmass is an anthropology professor at the University of Florida in Gainesville, where he is also director of its Jewish studies center. He specializes in American and European Jewry, Israel and Jews in New York.

Read an April 4, 2006, Beliefnet story from a Katrina survivor who writes that “the only thing that keeps me sane is knowing that God has a purpose for me.”

The Gulf Coast region includes many religious influences – among them, evangelical Protestantism and strong Catholicism, intertwined with a deeply Southern sense of family rootedness and place. Read a Sept. 18, 2005, story from The Boston Globe about the “distinctively Southern” nature of Katrina’s impact, and about how some people have responded in religious terms.

Jonathan Hess is director of the Carolina Center for Jewish Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Its faculty members are drawn from the humanities and social sciences.

Andrea Greenbaum is an associate professor of English at Barry University in Miami Shores, Fla. She is the editor of Jews of South Florida and is also an expert on Jewish graphic novels.

Gallup provides polling and analysis on dozens of pressing topics in the United States, many of which involve religion.