Susan K. Steeble

Susan K. Steeble was born and raised in Milford, CT, and has lived in Baltimore, MD, since 1966. She graduated with a degree of Bachelor of Arts Cum Laude from Mt. Holyoke College, where she was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, and she received a Master of Arts in Teaching degree from the Johns Hopkins University. After a brief stint teaching French in Baltimore high schools, she was employed as a copy editor for Williams & Wilkins/Waverly Press, a publisher of medical journals and books. Later, she became a production editor of medical journals for the same company, now called Lippincott Williams & Wilkins, a division of Wolters Kluwer Health.

Susan has been conducting genealogical research on her family for more than 25 years and has performed surname studies on several family lines, including the Freedhand/Fridgant family. She is a sixth-generation descendant of Rabbi Raphael of Bershad, who was a disciple of Rabbi Pinchas of Koretz, a spiritual leader in the early days of Chassidism. In 2008, Susan created a web site, Two Tzaddiks, to present their lives and teachings to the English-speaking world: http://twotzaddiks.org. In 2012, she published a family scrapbook, “Charting Our Past: Roots and Routes of the Freedhand-Kesselman and Kahan-Slutsky Families,” which traces the paths of her family from Russia to the United States.

Currently, Susan is the editor of L’dor V’dor, the quarterly newsletter of the Jewish Genealogy Society of Maryland. In 2015, the publication won the International Association of Jewish Genealogical Societies’ award for Outstanding Publication. She is also collaborating with Dr. Jeffrey Mark Paull and Dr. Jeffrey Briskman in a research study to identify the Y-DNA genetic signature of Rabbi Raphael of Bershad.