In Brief: December 06, 1999

1. Thousands of documents from the CairoGenizah, mostly of medieval Jewish history, will become available to scholars thanks to a multimillion-dollar grant from Toronto philanthropist Albert Friedberg. The Genizah, discovered in the mid-1890s, was a storage room in the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Old Cairo that housed books, letters, and other Hebrew and Judaic manuscripts. The Friedberg Genizah Project, administered through New York University, will transcribe and catalogue the manuscripts, only half of which have been published. The first Dead Sea Scroll is among the Genizah‘s 250,000 documents and fragments that are scattered in libraries and private collections around the world.
2. Stephen Noll, academic dean at Trinity Episcopal School for Ministry in Ambridge, Pennsylvania, has been appointed vice chancellor of Uganda Christian University. Based in Mukono near Kampala, the two-year-old school has 450 students.
3. Three American missionaries with Indianapolis-based Harvestfield Ministries were released from prison in Zimbabwe November 6. The men were arrested in March for possessing weapons of war (CT, Nov. 15, 1999, p. 28).

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