Wednesday, October 01, 2008

MORE ON THE DEAD SEA SCROLLS EXHIBITION coming to the Royal Ontario Museum:
It’s offical — Dead Sea Scrolls coming to ROM
By SHERI SHEFA, Staff Reporter (Canadian Jewish News)
Thursday, 02 October 2008
TORONTO — With Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty’s recent announcement, it’s now official – the Royal Ontario Museum will present the largest exhibition of the Dead Sea Scrolls outside of Israel next summer.

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I don't think we've heard a lot yet about the lecture series:
McGuinty thanked the co-chairs of the Dead Sea Scrolls community advisory panel – Mohammad Al Zaibak, co-founder, president and CEO of Canadian Development and Market-ing Corporation; Tony Gagliano, CEO of St. Joseph’s Media; and Jonas Prince, chairman of Realstar Group – for their dedication in fostering dialogue between diverse communities and faiths.
“I’m grateful as well to the Tanenbaum family for sponsoring the Anne Tanenbaum lecture series, a series of lectures that will help us better understand the significance of the scrolls and their significance to all of us today,” McGuinty said.
ROM director and CEO William Thorsell, who led the press conference, said he hopes the exhibit will be more than just a display, but also an educational experience.
“We hope to generate one of the great conversations in the history of Ontario and beyond about these foundation documents that are shared among great traditions, the Jewish tradition, the Christian tradition and the Islamic tradition that sees these as divinely inspired documents,” Thorsell said.
The Distinguished Lecturer Series, to be presented in conjunction with the exhibit, will feature scroll and Second Temple period scholars, including Emanuel Tov, a Hebrew Univer-sity professor and the editor-in-chief of the Dead Sea Scrolls Publication Project; Yuval Peleg, an IAA archeologist, and Dan Bahat, a Bar Ilan University professor and a former chief archeologist of the city of Jerusalem.