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.
Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty, Culture Minister Aileen Carroll and Consul General Amir Gissin. [Sheri Shefa photo]
The Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) and the ROM have collaborated to produce the exhibition that will be on display from June 27, 2009, until Jan. 3, 2010, in the ROM’s new addition, the Michael Lee-Chin Crystal.“The ROM will be the only museum in Canada where they will be on display… This is truly a once-in-a-lifetime chance to see these historical writings. This will be the largest collection of scrolls on exhibit outside of Israel’s borders,” McGuinty said.
The 16 scrolls, discovered in 1947 buried in a cave in Qumran in the Judean Desert by a Bedouin boy, will be divided into two groups of eight and each group will be on display for three months.
The display will include fragments of 16 scrolls, written between 250 BCE and 68 CE, from the books of Genesis, Deuteronomy and Psalms, as well as the sectarian Community Rule, War Scroll and Messianic Apocalypse.
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 University 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.
Dead Sea Scrolls guest curator, Risa Levitt Kohn, an alumna of York University and University of Toronto and director of the Jewish studies program at San Diego State University, said the exhibit will also include artifacts from ancient sites in Israel. The objects include a scroll jar that preserved some of the scrolls for 2,000 years, “perhaps better than our modern methods,” she said, and portions of the ancient gate leading to the Temple.
The press conference took a political turn when Thorsell praised McGuinty for his dedication to arts and culture in Ontario and criticized Prime Minister Stephen Harper for his recent decision to cut $45 million from arts and culture funding, and his comments about ordinary Canadians.
“I think when ordinary working people come home, turn on the TV and see a gala of a bunch of people at, you know, a rich gala all subsidized by taxpayers claiming their subsidies aren’t high enough, when they know those subsidies have actually gone up – I’m not sure that’s something that resonates with ordinary people,” Harper said in Saskatoon recently, where he was campaigning for the Oct. 14 election.
“It’s really nice to be in the presence of a leader who doesn’t ridicule the culture and the people who care about culture,” Thorsell said.
When asked about Harper’s position on arts and culture, Ontario Minister of Culture Aileen Carroll said, “I’m disappointed in what this government’s approach has been. I can’t understand that everything that we understand here in this province isn’t understood by the federal government.”
Consul General of Israel Amir Gissin said he is proud that Israel was given the opportunity to partner with the ROM and the Ontario government to mount the exhibit.
“We hear questioning about the State of Israel, and where we are going and how long we are going to be around… But when we look at it today, we know that Israel is a place of great creativity of great innovation in the areas of science and culture,” Gissin said.
“But we should let the scrolls, that are a very important part of our mutual history, to speak for itself.”
