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Click here to read (and hear) the Torah blessings.
This week's Torah portion is Parashat Re'eh. Havdalah starts 42 minutes after sundown, at 8:22 pm on Saturday, August 30. Courtesy of hebcal.com |
Candle lighting is at 7:24 pm on Friday, August 29.
 Ori Z. Soltes Ori Z. Soltes is Goldman Professorial Lecturer in Theology and Fine Arts at Georgetown University, as well as a frequent lecturer in the National and Resident Associate Programs of the Smithsonian Institution. He is the former Director and Curator of the B'nai B'rith Klutznick National Jewish Museum in Washington, DC, where he curated over 80 exhibitions. He has taught and lectured in 22 other universities and museums throughout the country, on subjects ranging from the Arab-Israel Conflict to Nazi-Plundered Art to the Body in Ancient Art. Both before and since his Directorship of the Klutznick Museum, he curated exhibitions across the country and overseas. While Director of the Museum, Professor Soltes co-founded the Holocaust Art Restitution Project, of which he is currently chairman. In that capacity he has been engaged for the past nine years in research pertaining to the plunder of art by the Nazis and its return to survivors and heirs more than a half century after the end of the war. He spent months as one of a handful of advisors to the State Department that led to the Washington Conference on Holocaust Assets and has testified before the United States Congress on this issue. Among the provenance cases in which he has been involved was the report for the Seattle Art Museum that resulted in the return of a major Matisse painting to its rightful owners. More recently his research helped lead to the return of a fourteenth-century mystical manuscript to the Jewish community of Vienna, Austria. Professor Soltes was educated in Classics and Philosophy at Haverford College, in Classics at Princeton University and The Johns Hopkins University, and in Interdisciplinary Studies at the Union University in Cincinnati. He is the author of over 130 essays, articles, exhibition catalogues and books on topics ranging from art, history, theology, and philosophy to literature and language—and the writer, director and narrator of over thirty documentary videos. His most recent books are Fixing the World: Jewish American Painters in the Twentieth Century (University Press of New England, 2002), Our Sacred Signs: Art in the Christian, Jewish and Muslim Traditions (Westview Press, 2005), and The Ashen Rainbow: Essays on the Arts and the Holocaust (forthcoming: Bartleby Press, October, 2006). Mr. Soltes has varying degrees of working knowledge in some two dozen languages and has lectured or taught throughout the United States, in various parts of the former Soviet Union, in Austria, France, Germany, Israel, Italy and Spain. He is thrilled to be working with and learning from the vibrant community of Beth Am.
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