Efraim Zuroff (born August 5, 1948, in New York) is an Israeli historian of American origin who has played a role in bringing Nazis indicted for war crimes to trial. Zuroff, director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center office in Jerusalem, is the coordinator of Nazi war crimes research worldwide for the Wiesenthal Center and the author of its annual (since 2001) "Status Report" on the worldwide investigation and prosecution of Nazi war criminals which includes a "most wanted" list of Nazi war criminals.

Born in New York, Zuroff moved to Israel in 1970 after completing his undergraduate degree in history (with honors) at Yeshiva University. He obtained an M.A. degree in Holocaust studies at the Institute of Contemporary Jewry of the Hebrew University, where he also completed his Ph.D., which chronicles the response of Orthodox Jewry in the United States to the Holocaust and focuses on the rescue attempts launched by the Vaad ha-Hatzala rescue committee established by American Orthodox rabbis in 1939. In 2000, Yeshiva University Press and KTAV Publishing House published his study of the history of the Vaad ha-Hatzala, which was awarded an Egit Grant for Holocaust and Jewish Resistance Literature by the Israeli General Federation of Labor (Histadrut) and also received the 1999-2000 Samuel Belkin Literary Award for the best book published by a Yeshiva University alumnus in the field of Jewish studies.

Dovid Katz (Yiddish: הירשע־דוד כּ״ץ — Hirshe-Dovid Kats) (born 1956) is an American-born, Vilnius-based Yiddish studies scholar and human rights activist, currently living in Lithuania.

Born in the New York City borough of Brooklyn into the Lithuanian-Jewish or Litvak family of the award-winning Yiddish poet Menke Katz, Dovid Katz graduated from Columbia University in 1978, completing a doctorate on the origins of the Yiddish language at the University of London. A founding instructor of the Yiddish studies program at Oxford University, Katz began publishing Yiddish fiction while in the United Kingdom under the nom de plume Heershadovid Menkes in 1992 following the death of his father. He co-founded the Oxford Institute for Yiddish Studies in 1994, serving as research director for the institute until 1997.

After a year as visiting professor at Yale University (1998-1999), Katz relocated to Vilnius in 1999 in order to take up a new chair in Yiddish language, literature and culture, and to found the Center for Stateless Culture at Vilnius University which he directed for its first two years. He had relocated his old Oxford Yiddish summer program to Vilnius a year earlier (summer 1998). In 2001, he founded the Vilnius Yiddish Institute at Vilnius University and remained its research director until 2010. Doctor Katz is the author of Words on Fire: The Unfinished Story of Yiddish (2007), which traces the evolution of the Yiddish language over a millennium, as well as three books of fiction in Yiddish and numerous scholarly works on aspects of the Yiddish language and Lithunian Jewish culture.