Monday, August 29, 2011

Lecture on Qumran Tefillin by Yonatan Adler

LECTURE: The Tefillin of Qumran: Archeology and Halacha, by Yonatan Adler at Chabad Oxford, Friday at 1:00 am, British time. It appears that it will be live-streamed at the link.
Rabbi and archeologist, Yonatan Adler, tackles a medieval rabbinic debate about the proper arrangement of the parchments within tefillin by comparing these opinions to actual 2,000-year-old phylacteries found in Qumran.

Rabbi Dr. Yonatan Adler is an Israeli archaeologist, and has recently completed his Ph.D. dissertation at Bar-Ilan University in Israel, entitled: “The Archaeology of Purity: Archaeological Evidence for the Observance of Ritual Purity in Ereẓ-Israel from the Hasmonean Period until the End of the Talmudic Era (164 BCE – 400 CE)”. Adler is also a graduate of Yeshivat Merkaz HaRav in Jerusalem, where he received rabbinical ordination from the Chief Rabbinate of Israel. He is currently resident at Oxford, as a Visiting Scholar at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies.