The Harry and Jeanette Weinberg Foundation has committed a $1 million matching grant for the establishment of the $2.5 million Harry and Jeanette Weinberg Endowment. This is the ICJS's largest gift on record, and it follows the generous gift of $500,000 that the Weinberg Foundation gave to the original endowment of the Institute in 1993. The Weinberg gift will support the establishment of the Jewish Scholar's Chair.

Since its inception in 1959, the Weinberg Foundation has sup-ported projects that help people to live with dignity. In the late 1930s, while still a young man with an infant son, Harry Weinberg signed Affidavits of Support pledging his then meager assets to enable many German Jews to reach safe haven in America.

Mr. Weinberg understood how religion could have an impact on human behavior, and he was well aware of the tragically negative effect that some religious teachings had during the Holocaust. The trustees of the Weinberg Foundation under-stand that religion can also have a positive effect, and, in supporting the work of the ICJS with such generosity, they materially further such efforts both in this community and nationally.

George Bunting, Bernard Manekin, and Charles Obrecht, co-chairpersons of the ICJS, noted in response to this wonderful commitment that Harry and Jeanette Weinberg were visionaries. Their insistence that fully one quarter of the Foundation's donations be directed toward charitable efforts largely within the Christian community demonstrated their understanding of the imperative to create a new relationship between Christians and Jews.

The ICJS Jewish Scholar, Rabbi David Sandmel, joined the Institute last fall. David was ordained at the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion. He served as a rabbi in Cleveland, Ohio, and in Portland, Maine. David is currently completing his doctoral dissertation at the University of Penn-sylvania, exploring the ways that modern Jewish scholars have read and interpreted the birth of Christianity and the emergence of Rabbinic Judaism. David comes from a tradition of Christian and Jewish Studies. His father, who taught Hebrew Bible and New Testament at HUC-JIR, was a pioneer in Jewish-Christian relations. David will be involved in all aspects of ICJS work, but will initially concentrate on coordinating the ground-breaking national effort that has been created by the ICJS and a group of the most respected and well-known Jewish scholars in America. The goal of the project will be to generate a new conversation within the American Jewish community and be-tween the Jewish and Christian communities. More will be forthcoming on this exciting project as it progresses.