Lori Heyman Gordon

Marriage and Family Therapist Lori Gordon, together with her late husband, Rabbi Morris Gordon, established the PAIRS Foundation in 1983 in Falls Church, VA as a 501(c)(3) non-profit charity chartered to develop programs for the prevention of marital and family breakdown.

Prior to founding PAIRS, Mrs. Gordon served as a faculty member of the American University School of Counseling Education in Washington, D.C. She received her undergraduate degree at Cornell University and Masters in Social Work from Catholic University.

In 2004, Mrs. Gordon irrevocably transferred any interest she may have had in the range of PAIRS materials to the GORDON CHARITABLE TRUST, naming PAIRS Foundation as 100 percent beneficiary, including the PAIRS Relationship Mastery Program and more than a dozen adaptations, such as: PAIRS Jumpstart, If You Really Loved Me, Passage to Intimacy, PAIRS First, Christian PAIRS, PrePAIRS for Catholic Marriage, PrePAIRS for Jewish Marriage, PrePAIRS for Christian Marriage, PAIRS Basic for the Military, PAIRS Coming of Age, PAIRS for PEERS, Family PAIRS, Florida Pre-Marriage Program, Florida Pre-Divorce Program, PAIRS Connection to Wellness, PAIRS Bridging Differences, PAIRS Family Experience, and PAIRS Up.

Mrs. Gordon served as President of PAIRS from its founding through June 2008.

Mrs. Gordon was a Plenary presenter at the First Annual Coalition for Marriage, Family and Couples Education Smart Marriages Conference in 1997 in Washington, DC. and has presented at its Annual Conference since then. In 2002 she was honored with their major Impact Award for having pioneered the PAIRS program. The Award reads:

"In appreciation of your intrepid pioneering work in creating the PAIRS program and for your visionary leadership in blazing a path for so many to follow."

She continues to serve on the coalition Advisory Board.

Mrs. Gordon's primary life goal has been to bring the benefits of Relationship Education, Emotional Literacy, and healthy marital and family relationships to as broad a population as possible through encouraging and training excellent leaders and educators along with teaching selected presentations to the public. Her interviews and articles in the national media, including multiple appearances on the NBC Today Show, and feature stories in dozens of leading newspapers and magazines, helped promote broad public awareness for the field of relationship skills training and the potential impact on marriages, families, and children.

Seth Daniel Eisenberg

Seth Eisenberg is President and CEO of PAIRS Foundation, a leading national TRAINER, and Project Director of the federally-funded PAIRS Relationship Skills for Strong South Florida Families grant project.

Since first joining PAIRS in 1995, Eisenberg has trained more than 1,000 instructors nationwide who are actively involved in efforts to strengthen families, couple relationships, and improve the well-being of children and adolescents through educational classes that range from half day seminars and weekend intensives to extended multi-week workshops and a semester-long Relationship Mastery Program.

For more than a decade, Eisenberg has played a key role developing and piloting intensive multi-lingual educational programs for diverse communities, including low-literacy, economically distressed, and others facing unique relationship transitions, such as returning from combat deployment, adoptive couples, and reentry to the community after incarceration. He has delivered classes to thousands of participants, from high school students to couples and singles in all stages of relationship, and is spearheading PAIRS efforts to develop and cost-effectively deliver highly effective, research-validated relationship skills programs over the Internet.

Eisenberg is co-author of PAIRS Essentials (2008), a research-driven skills building curriculum that includes innovative tools and technology to enhance communication, emotional understanding and expression; deepen empathy, bonding, and compassion; and expand options for navigating conflict; co-author of TEAMS (2000), an educational program designed to produce breakthroughs in workplace productivity, collaboration, retention and similar measures in visionary enterprises; a contributing author of Building Intimate Relationships (2001); and senior contributor in a range of other relationship building programs, including: PAIRS For Life (2009), PAIRS for PEERS (2008), and For Our Future, For Our Family (2007).

Prior to joining PAIRS, Eisenberg served as executive director of a New York-based national Jewish organization, working closely with the highest levels of government both in the U.S. and Israel. In that capacity, he served as a member of the prestigious Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish organizations. He is a past president of Junior Achievement, a nationwide economic education program serving hundreds of thousands of high school students, and former vice president of USTrading Corporation. He also served as editor of COMMUNITY newspaper for two years and as a reporter covering Capitol Hill for Washington Radio and Press Bureau. He is the former At-Large chair of the National Writers Union and elected regional official of the United Auto Workers Technical, Office, and Professional Division.

In 2006, Eisenberg's grant proposal was selected by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) Administration for Children and Families (ACF) for nearly $5 million in federal funding over a five-year period. Eisenberg also developed guidelines for partnerships with more than a dozen other national multi-year projects funded by DHHS.

Eisenberg is an active member of the South Florida community, where he has served on the Board of the YMCA, chaired the annual Partners with Youth Scholarship and Heroes of the Red Cross campaigns, coached youth athletics, and advised various public and private enterprises, including the Daniel Cantor Wultz Foundation (www.dcwfoundation.org), the Israel Voices Project (www.israelvoices.org), which he co-founded in 2006, and 411-KIDS, a volunteer organization he established to help homeless youth living on the streets of South Florida.

Eisenberg's work and interests have been widely featured in the media, including interviews, appearances, articles and letters in: New York Times, Jerusalem Post, South Florida Sun-Sentinel, Miami Herald, Boston Herald, Boston Globe, International Herald Tribune, Wall Street Journal, Washington Times, Charleston Gazette, San Diego Union-Tribune, Omaha World-Herald, Associated Press, Orlando Sentinel, Toronto Star, Baltimore Sun, Chicago Tribune, Tampa Tribune, Times of London, Haaretz, ABC-TV, NBC-TV, MSNBC and many others.

Eisenberg, his wife, and three sons live in Weston, Florida. His hobbies include tennis, chess, photography, sports, and technology.

Eisenberg posts regularly to his personal blog, Redefining Relationships, on Wordpress.

E-mail: seth.eisenberg@pairs.com.

Virginia Satir

A pioneer in family therapy, Virginia Satir (1916-1988) was internationally acclaimed as a therapist, lecturer, trainer, and author. After helping start the prestigious Mental Research Institute in Palo Alto, California, she continued developing her approach to counseling individuals and families. She was perhaps best known for her work in self-esteem. She was known for her special warmth and her remarkable insight into human communication and self-esteem. Her work influenced many other theorists, writers, leaders, and therapists throughout the world. Her best-selling work, The New Peoplemaking (revised shortly before her death) is probably the clearest and most inclusive description of family life available. And the third edition of her Conjoint Family Therapy remains a classic in the field of family dynamics. Virginia served as founding chairperson of PAIRS.

Satir wrote the introduction to the original PAIRS Relationship Mastery Program Curriculum Guide, including:

"In a world where equality between human beings is generally not practiced and maybe not known, the material contained in PAIRS is a truly significant, pioneering effort."

Rabbi Morris Gordon, Ph.D.

The worldwide PAIRS community mourned the death in March 2005 of Rabbi Morris Gordon, co-creator of PAIRS, beloved husband of Lori Gordon.  His unlimited vision made possible the impossible, probable the improbable, and the world a safer, saner, more loving place. His life story, Dare to Be: Autobiography of Rabbi Morris Gordon, was published posthumously. The following excerpt was written about Rabbi Gordon by Seth Eisenberg the year before his death.

At 89, Rabbi Morris Gordon still loves to dance. Although at times he struggles to hear, he never fails to move effortlessly to a rhythm most others don't begin to detect. A rhythm that led Dr. Gordon to brave enemy fire on China's Burma Road for which he received the American Bronze Star and Chinese Medal of Honor . to counsel, console and inspire troops of all persuasions at home and in distant lands . to build houses of worship and help heal homes void of love for thousands. It was that rhythm that brought him to lead Capitol Hill services at the inauguration of President John F. Kennedy. And it was that rhythm that led him to his seat atop the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on a warm August afternoon in 1963 when a brilliant 34 year-old preacher from Montgomery, Alabama stood just a few yards away and moved a nation with four words that continue to inspire our world: I have a dream.

Morris Gordon graduated as Rabbi with Distinction from the Jewish Theological Seminary of America where he was later awarded a doctorate. He served as Chaplain in the United States Air Force in World War II in the famed Flying Tigers unit under the command of General Claire Chennault. During his perilous journey on the precipitous Burma Road, Chaplain Gordon was under constant enemy sniper fire. In her presentation of the Chinese Medal of Honor, Madame Chang Kai Chek personally acknowledged Rabbi Gordon for his bravery, dedication and heroism.

Dr. Gordon's history has been recorded by the Jewish War Veterans Museum and, under the supervision of director Steven Spielberg, the United States Holocaust Museum, both in Washington, D.C., to assure his oral testimony and significant tangible physical artifacts are preserved for generations to come.

One of Rabbi Gordon's most cherished memories from his service during World War II is the personal role he played organizing a ship and safe passage for 1,000 refugee children to travel from Shanghai to Israel. Decades later, long after these youngsters grew to adulthood, he crossed paths with some of them working on a road building project in Israel's magnificent Negev desert. These former refugees, now parents themselves, greeted Chaplain Gordon with gratitude and enthusiasm that left him forever touched by the opportunity he had been blessed with to impact their lives.

Rabbi Gordon's profound spiritual consciousness and unstoppable personal spirit has shaped a life of contribution and connection, leading him to initiate innovative approaches to inspire and empower youth through the United Synagogue Youth program, USY, he helped create while serving as Rabbi at Temple Adath Yeshurun in Minneapolis, Minnesota. USY went on to become a worldwide movement that has helped connect hundreds of thousand of Jewish teenagers to their own spiritual roots and inspired countless acts of compassion and charity.

While serving the Minneapolis community, Rabbi Gordon developed a close friendship with the community's young mayor, Hubert H. Humphrey. Mayor Humphrey went on to serve as a United States Senator, and in 1964, vice president of the United States in the Administration of President Lyndon Johnson. Three years earlier, in January 1961, it was Senator Humphrey who personally asked Rabbi Gordon to lead the invocation before a joint session of Congress for the occasion of John F. Kennedy's presidential inauguration. Until his death in 1978, Senator Humphrey remained one of Rabbi Gordon's most cherished friends.

Having followed Senator Humphrey to Washington, Rabbi Gordon went on to become one of the community's most influential religious leaders, well known for his work to foster cooperation and understanding between Christians and Jews, provide leadership for other rabbis, and his unwavering commitment to help families establish houses of prayer convenient to the neighborhoods in which they lived and raised their children. Rabbi Gordon personally oversaw the founding of eight congregations in the Washington metropolitan area and closely assisted with six others. The Har Shalom Congregation in Potomac, Maryland honored him by naming their sanctuary the Rabbi Morris Gordon Sanctuary, an extraordinary honor never before bestowed on a living rabbi by any synagogue in the Washington area.

Rabbi Gordon is past President of the Rabbinical Assembly of Greater Washington, representative to the Interfaith Council, and former Chairman of Education of the Washington Board of Rabbis. As their delegate, he was seated on the platform at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., next to entertainer Harry Belafonte, when Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. electrified generations with his inspiring words.

Rabbi Gordon retains his love for literature and music, is a much sought after speaker on topics ranging from Albert Einstein's personal spirituality to Jewish mysticism. He is fluent in classical Hebrew and is an esteemed interpreter of biblical literature.

Since 1984, Rabbi Gordon's fervent passion has been to help couples and children of all backgrounds, cultures and religions. That year he and his wife -- pioneering author, therapist and lecturer, Dr. Lori Gordon -- established the non-profit PAIRS Foundation to teach relationship skills. Since then, the Gordon's PAIRS program has touched countless lives through a network of more than 1,000 trained professionals and lay leaders who share their innovative emotional development, communications and conflict resolution techniques in 75 communities across America and 15 nations. Between them, Rabbi Gordon and his wife have authored or co-authored more than a dozen books and training manuals promoting healthy, happy relationships.

Rabbi Gordon also has a dream. His dream is for a world in which every youngster learns knowledge and skills for successful relationships as a fourth "R" to the traditional curriculum of reading, writing and arithmetic. Rabbi Gordon believes that with these understandings and skills, the foundation of our world - our homes and families - will be stronger and our planet will be safer, saner and more loving. For the past 20 years, he has invited every person he's met to share in that dream.

Rest in peace.

Daniel Casriel, MD

Dan Casriel's unique contributions to PAIRS include significant expansion on the concept of the human need for bonding, defined as emotional openness and physical closeness as continuing throughout life, as a source of ease, pleasure, self worth and creativity, as opposed to disease, distress and distrust that often underpin the inability for closeness needs to be met. Included in these concepts are that one needn't be perfect to be loved. One can make mistakes and learn from them. The loneliness that is endemic in our culture and often found in distressed relationships can many times be traced to an inability to meet through human connection the need for bonding. The notion that this need goes on throughout life can be verified not only in infants who are not nurtured and often die, but in nursing homes for the aged where those who have no human contact often pass on far sooner that others who have sources of connection and bonding with others in their lives, sometimes even with pets who are often brought into nursing homes as 'therapy pets' to provide human physical and emotional contact. Casriel's unique presentations on the logic of love and emotion as related to adult bonding needs that can be separate from sexual needs -- although can be added to and perhaps more enduring -- are woven throughout PAIRS.