1989 Mogilany Conference Featured Lively Debates

Mogilany 1989, Papers on the Dead Sea Scrolls Offered in Memory of Jean Carmignac

Zdzislaw Jan Kapera Part I (Krakow: Enigma Press, 1993) 244 pp., $28.00 cloth, $18.00 paper; Part II (Krakow: Enigma Press, 1991) 294 pp., $28.00 cloth, $18.00 paper

These are the papers delivered at the Dead Sea Scroll conference in Mogilany, Poland, in 1989, one of a number of recent Dead Sea Scrolls conferences that reflect the phenomenal progress of the field in the past few years. Part II was published two years ago. Part I has just appeared.

In truth, many of us who attended the first Mogilany conference in 1987 did so out of curiosity. Imagine, a Dead Sea Scrolls conference in a Polish village just south of Krakow! It was an opportunity to see a country few of us had seen, “the valley of the shadow of death” that before the Holocaust had been the crown of East 079European Jewry. When we arrived, we found that this conference was not only an opportunity to exchange ideas with familiar colleagues but, perhaps more important, to meet scholars from what was then the Eastern Bloc. The first exchange of Qumran information through this channel can, in retrospect, be seen as a minuscule crack in the Iron Curtain around the Communist world—the fall of which we never believed would come so quickly.