Judith Ida Kestenberg (née Silberpfennig; 17 March 1910 in Tarnów, Austria-Hungary – 16 January 1999 in Sands Point, New York) was a child psychiatrist.

She founded the International Study of Organized Persecution of Children (ISOPC), which conducted extensive interviews with over 1,500 survivors worldwide.

[1] Concerned with the persecution of the Socialist Party of which she was a member, and interested in continuing her studies, Kestenberg emigrated in 1937 to New York City, where she worked with Paul Ferdinand Schilder at Bellevue Hospital in child psychiatry.

She was Professor of Clinical Psychiatry at New York University School of Medicine and also worked at the Long Island Jewish Medical Center.

Kestenberg, like other child psychiatrists, confronted the challenge of analyzing and helping very young children who had limited verbal skills.

[3] It includes a profile of temperament, learning styles, use of psychological defenses, cognitive patterns and ways of coping in space weight and time.

[8] It continues to be studied and applied[citation needed] in Germany, South Korea, the UK, Italy, Switzerland, Argentina, the Netherlands, Israel, and the United States.

Psychiatrists, dance movement therapists and other professionals led the parents and children in play formulated to enhance and reinforce natural developmental patterns.

So Kestenberg undertook a study of conditions of Jewish children during the Holocaust to help individuals recover their memories and combat their traumas.

She also developed a system using reimagining kinesthetic sensations, such as of being held, to help adult survivors remember their parents who were murdered during the Holocaust.

"[14] In 1989, Myriam Abramowicz, director and co-producer of As if it Were Yesterday,[15] approached, the Kestenbergs, Fogelman, and Jean Bloch Rosensaft with her vision to organize an international gathering of child survivors who had been hidden during the Holocaust.

Hidden children were those who survived the Holocaust by being placed in convents, monasteries, orphanages, non-Jewish homes, or by hiding on their own with or without false identification in forests or in plain sight.

Milton and Judith Kestenberg provided the initial funding necessary to plan the First International Gathering of Hidden Children, co-sponsored with the ADL, which happened in 1991.