[2] Her father’s career as a painter, muralist, and professor of art and design placed her as a child in North Carolina, Europe, and Woodstock, New York, where she graduated salutatorian from Onteora Central School.
A student of the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr and his wife Ursula,[4] she graduated magna cum laude from the Columbia University School of General Studies in 1965.
[5] In 2004 Mesinai was designated, on an honor roll of 250 alumni spanning a 250-anniversary period, as Number 199 of Columbia University’s “greatest graduates.” Her selection was in response to her research into the Raoul Wallenberg case and her continued concern for the rights for the Disappeared.
Kazachkov and Mesinai initiated a trans-Russia appeal for information regarding missing American prisoners of war, both through publication in the human rights press and radio networking.
[8][9][10] Because of this case and others in which she became involved, Mesinai was able to establish that anonymous foreign prisoners or dual nationals were still being held in asylums and psychiatric facilities throughout the former Soviet Union.
As the majority of the earlier records had been removed to the East, she reverted to her comprehensive study of eyewitness reports, focusing also on other Swedes in the Gulag who could be mistaken for Wallenberg.
Here, Mesinai again challenged the Soviet argument of an early death against the more prevalent practice of “disappearing” an important prisoner either by giving him a series of false identities, or a number.
In 2007, she joined her independent colleagues, Dr. Marvin Makinen of the University of Chicago, himself a former inmate of Vladimir Prison, and Ari Kaplan, prize-winning mathematician and statistician, to continue their combined studies initiated in Russia between 1997 and 2000.