Next Year in Jerusalem

Excerpt

Excerpt

For the last two decades or so, we have held our annual symposium on the last Sunday and Monday of October. At the conclusion of every year’s event—and sometimes even before then—someone asks about the topic for the following year. This is not surprising, since our selection of a different topic for each year is a distinctive feature of our series of symposia—and from my perspective (and not mine alone, I think) a positive characteristic.

So it was that at the end of October 2016, with the twenty-ninth symposium still a vivid memory, I began soliciting ideas for our thirtieth installment from my academic colleagues and interested members of Omaha’s Jewish community. My good friend Moshe Gershovich, director of the University of Nebraska at Omaha’s Schwalb Center and an active cosponsor of the symposium series, was brimming with enthusiasm as he suggested “Exile and Return.”

In this context he was especially interested in the Balfour Declaration, which was promulgated one hundred years earlier in 1917. We talked about Moshe’s delivering the keynote address on this topic. Alas, Moshe’s death, which was a personal and professional loss to all who knew him, intervened, and he was no longer alive in the fall of 2017.

We did keep alive Moshe’s idea for the symposium. Recognizing that we could not find a “substitute” Moshe, as it were, to make a keynote presentation, we went in another direction with a concert by renowned performers Maria Krupoves and Gerard Edery. This was made possible through the generosity of the director of the University of Nebraska–Lincoln’s Harris Center, Jean Cahan.

In a sense, then, the symposium and these essays are a tribute to Moshe and his vision. In a larger sense, they also reflect the combined talents and energies of those who participated in this symposium and prepared a publishable written version of their presentations.