Nina Graboi (December 8, 1918 – December 13, 1999) was a Holocaust survivor, artist, writer, spiritual seeker, philosopher, and influential figure in the sixties psychedelic movement. After fleeing the Nazis in Europe and spending three months in a detention camp in North Africa, she and her husband came to United States as refugees. As a close friend and colleague of Timothy Leary's and Richard Alpert's (Ram Dass), she was co-founder and director of the League for Spiritual Discovery's New York Center during the psychedelic era. The center was the first LSD-based meditation center in Manhattan. She also worked closely with Jean Houston, Abraham Maslow, Stanley Krippner, and Alan Watts.
Early life
Born Jewish in Vienna, Austria in 1918 as Gusti Schreyer, and brought up in the thriving Jewish community of Leopoldstadt district, she fled the Nazis in the late 1930s and lived/worked as a refugee in London, England. While in Antwerp, Belgium on an extended visit, she married Jewish scarfmaker and Kishinev refugee Michel Graboi, whose father had been killed in the Kishinev pogrom. Many European Jews who sought a safe haven from Nazi persecution, including the Grabois, had difficulty with the United States' restrictive immigration quotas and the complicated, demanding requirements for obtaining visas. In an attempt to immigrate to America after finally obtaining a visa, the Grabois fled to France and set sail on the Wyoming freighter. Along with other Jewish refugees on the ship, the Grabois were detained in Casablanca, Morocco, then controlled by Vichy France, and sent to the Oued Zem detention camp in French Morocco. The implementation of anti-Jewish laws passed by the Vichy regime was not as extreme in Morocco.
After making it to America in 1941 on the steamer Guinee – with the help of family who had previously immigrated to the U.S., the Joint Distribution Committee, and the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society – Gusti changed her name to Nina. The Grabois settled in New York State and had two children.
Nina Graboi's sister-in-law was artist Greta Loebl.
Pre-psychedelic background
Dissatisfied with her life in Long Island as a society hostess, in the 1950s Graboi plunged into the study of esoteric subjects and became an avid practitioner of meditation, while also running a theater group. As she learned about comparative religion, she became more interested in Buddhism and Hinduism. Her private studies continued through the early 1960s.
After learning about Walter Pahnke's 1962 Good Friday Experiment, in which theology students were given psilocybin as part of psychedelic research at Harvard University under the supervision of Leary and Alpert, Graboi longed to experience what the divinity students had experienced. She realized there was more to these drugs than the media had let people know, and it was the first time she had heard of an experiment with exceptional states of consciousness. In early 1965, Graboi went to a seminar given by a Tibetan Buddhist teacher, and joined a weekly spiritual group led by Virginia Glenn with participants Stanley Krippner, Jean Houston, and Ida Rolf. Glenn helped birth the Human Potential Movement.
In early 1966 Graboi's translation of Jacques Audiberti's anti-war play Les Patients was used in an Off-Broadway production directed by Eugene Lion. With Lion's encouragement Graboi founded The Third Force Lecture Bureau, which promoted and presented speakers in New York City – her clients included Alan Watts, Ira Progoff, USCO, Yoko Ono, Charles Tart, Paul Krassner, and Peter Stafford. Glenn introduced Graboi to Timothy Leary and Larry Bogart at one of Leary's press conferences, a few months after Leary (by this point a former lecturer at Harvard University in Clinical Psychology), had been arrested in December 1965 for possession of marijuana. Bogart was doing public relations for Leary, and through Bogart's suggestion Graboi rented an office across from his at United Nations Plaza. While working there, Bogart introduced Graboi to Richard Alpert (later Ram Dass) and Ralph Metzner.