Rachel Amado Bortnick
Co-Director
Rachel Amado Bortnick was born and raised in Izmir, Turkey, in a Ladino-speaking Jewish family and community. She came to the United States in 1958 on a scholarship to Lindenwood College (now University) in St. Charles, Missouri, from which she earned a B.A. in Chemistry. She and American-born architect Bernard Bortnick, whom she had met in St. Louis, traveled back to Izmir to get married and subsequently lived in Holland, Israel, and several cities in the United States before settling in Dallas, Texas in 1988. Leaving the chemistry profession, she taught ESOL (English for Speakers of Other Languages) for 35 years and has been retired since 2009.
Rachel has long been active in the preservation and promotion of Judeo-Spanish language and culture. In 1985, while living in the San Francisco Bay area, she founded and led the Ladino-speaking club Los Amigos Sefaradis, and was featured in the documentary film Trees Cry for Rain: A Sephardic Journey (Burt Productions, 1988). In December of 1999 Rachel founded Ladinokomunita, the Ladino correspondence group on the Internet, which is still going strong with 1500 members worldwide and a rich archive of nearly sixty thousand messages, as well as thousands of files and photographs. Rachel continues to moderate and write in Ladinokomunita daily. She also continues to write articles, in Ladino and in English, about her Sephardic culture. Several of Rachel’s articles in English have been published in academic and popular journals, and most recently her work on the history of the Bet Israel synagogue of Izmir appeared in the book Izmir: The Jewish Pearl of the Aegean (Istanbul: Libra Books, 2023).
Rachel has taught Ladino in-person and virtually for organizations including the Sephardic Brotherhood of America. She has served as the President of the Dallas Jewish Historical Society and as secretary of the Society for Crypto-Judaic Studies.
Bryan Kirschen
Co-Director
Dr. Bryan Kirschen is Associate Professor of Hispanic Linguistics at Binghamton University, where he is also Chair of the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures. His scholarship on Judeo-Spanish and Sociolinguistics appears in noted academic journals and edited volumes. He received his PhD from UCLA in 2015.
Over the past 15 years, Dr. Kirschen has worked as an educator as well as a community organizer and activist of Judeo-Spanish. Through his Ladino Linguist platform, he has taught more than two-hundred learners of Judeo-Spanish, from beginner to advanced levels, and several hundred more through partnerships with the Sephardic Brotherhood of America, the Sephardic Adventure Camp, and the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles. He also curates the digital humanities project, Documenting Judeo-Spanish, focused on the Hebrew-based Sephardic cursive known as Solitreo.
Dr. Kirschen currently serves as the director of the international delegation of Shadarim, in collaboration with the National Authority of Ladino. Since 2019, he has co-organized the American Sephardi Federation’s annual New York Ladino Day at the Center for Jewish History (Manhattan) and, prior to that, organized similar programming through the Sephardic Brotherhood of America (Queens). Since its launch in 2020, Dr. Kirschen has also served as a host of the weekly Enkontro de alhad online series. At Binghamton University, he was the founding co-director of Binghamton University’s Ladino Collaboratory and Ladino Apprenticeship Program (2020-2023) and at UCLA, the founding co-director of the student organization and annual symposium ucLADINO (2011-2015). In 2017, Dr. Kirschen was a recipient of the New York Jewish Week’s “36 Under 36” award” under the category of education for his university and community-based work in relation to Judeo-Spanish.
Hannah Pressman
Co-Director
Dr. Hannah S. Pressman received her Ph.D. in modern Hebrew literature from New York University and has published widely on Jewish languages, gender, and religion. She is the Director of Education and Engagement at the HUC-JIR Jewish Language Project, which preserves endangered Jewish languages around the world. She is also affiliate faculty at the University of Washington’s Stroum Center for Jewish Studies.
Dr. Pressman has spent the past two decades researching her family history in Turkey (Bodrum) and Rhodes. Her memoir essays have appeared in Tablet, The Forward, Hadassah Magazine, and the edited volume Sephardic Trajectories: Archives, Objects, and the Ottoman Jewish Past in the United States (2021). Dr. Pressman is currently at work on a memoir exploring Sephardic Jewish identity in America. She is proud to be a heritage learner and especially enjoys writing in Ladino. She brings her passion for language study to her new role facilitating Los Muevos Ladineros meetings in Seattle.
With extensive experience at the intersection of communications and higher education, Dr. Pressman is passionate about making knowledge accessible to learners of all levels. She has been a curriculum writer and consultant for PJ Library of North America; a keynote speaker for Seattle Ladino Day; and a mentor for the Ladino Collaboratory at Binghamton University. Currently Dr. Pressman serves on committees for the National Jewish Book Awards and the American Jewish Historical Society. She lives in Seattle with her husband and three children.