HUC's Glueck helped save scrollsThere's also a slide show of artifacts in the exhibition. And here's another, much briefer article with a photo and a video tour: Dead Sea Scrolls headline newest Museum Center exhibit.
HUC’s interest in the preservation, transcription and scholarship of the Dead Sea Scrolls started shortly after their discovery in 1948, when Jerusalem’s Hebrew University contacted HUC’s president, Nelson Glueck, for help in trying to purchase them.
Glueck, who was HUC president until his death in 1971, was an archeologist who did much work in the Mideast.
That was the start of a connection that has made HUC a center for Dead Sea Scroll scholarship to this day. In 1969, Glueck contributed $10,000 to create and store on campus a photographic security copy of the scrolls, in case anything happened to the originals while access was still limited.
So significant has been HUC’s involvement, in fact, that it actually has a professor on staff – Jason Kalman – whose specialty is studying the history of HUC’s role in Dead Sea Scroll scholarship. HUC is planning to loan items from its collection to the Museum Center. Another professor, Nili Fox, is handling that.
The Museum Center has been after a Dead Sea Scrolls show since major ones began appearing in the United States early last decade. There has been increased international interest in the subject ever since transcriptions and photographs started to become more widely available in the 1990s.
“We thought it was a significant historical and scientific exhibit, and whenever there is one, we try to bring it to the people of Cincinnati,” said David Duszynski, Museum Center’s vice president for Featured Experiences & Customer Services. “Especially when we see how popular it was in other cities, we thought we really should be after this exhibit.”
Background on the Philadelphia exhibition is here and links.