Nina Graboi (1918–1999)

Nina Graboi was born Gusti Schreyer to a Jewish family in Vienna, Austria. After the Nazi Anschluss (annexation) of her country in 1938, she fled to London, England, where she took a series of low-paying jobs. Part of her family had gone to Antwerp, Belgium; on a visit there, she met and married Michel Graboi, a scarfmaker and refugee from Kishinev (present-day Moldava). At the outbreak of World War II, the newlyweds lived under German Occupation for a year before being smuggled into southern France. In Marseilles, they boarded a freighter bound for the USA but were stopped in Casablanca, Morocco and held at the Oued Zem detention camp for six weeks, eventually being allowed to proceed to New York City with the help of family in the USA and Jewish relief agencies. Arriving penniless in 1941, the couple had two children and set up a successful textile business on Long Island. She changed her name to Nina and searched for spiritual meaning in life. In the 1950s, she became an avid practitioner of meditation. She also ran a successful theater group and in 1966, her translation of Jacques Audiberti's anti-war play Les Patients was mounted in an Off-Broadway production directed by Eugene Lion. With Lion's encouragement, she founded The Third Force Lecture Bureau, which promoted and presented speakers in New York City. Also that year, she met Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert (later Ram Dass), colleagues in the 1962 Marsh Chapel experiment with psychedelic drugs at Boston University. At age 47, Nina left her husband and began spending time at Millbrook, Leary and Alpert's communal estate in upstate New York, where she took psychelic drug trips. Nina co-founded the Center for the League of Spiritual Discovery in a Greenwich Village storefront; she was named its director. The nonprofit organization operated to help and educate people explore the potential of psychedelic consciousness. It became a hotspot for New York's counterculture. Leary, Alpert, and Nina gave free weekly talks at the center and at other Manhattan locations.
In 1968, LSD was added to the list of Schedule 1 substances, which made it illegal to possess, manufacture, or use for any purpose in the USA. Nina moved to Woodstock a few months before the Woodstock festival, and opened a boutique where she sold her crafts. She founded the Woodstock Transformation Center, and taught New Age-related classes. She moved to Santa Cruz, California in 1979, where she worked for mathematics professor Ralph Abraham. She also gave talks in Santa Cruz and at conferences on the relationship between the psychedelic experience and the spiritual quest. She wrote her autobiography, One Foot in the Future: A Woman's Spiritual Journey, published in 1991.