GuideStar and other groups track the performance of nonprofit groups – although the relief arms of some faith groups, if they are not separately incorporated, do not qualify.

Read a June 26, 2006, analysis by The New York Times saying that scams and mismanagement related to Katrina relief could cost taxpayers $2 billion.

David Patterson is a professor of Holocaust studies at the University of Texas at Dallas. He is an expert on the Holocaust and serves as an adviser to two U.S. Holocaust museums.

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.”

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.