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Friday December 14, 2007

Shorts: Art

CBS special includes Israel’s chief rabbi

A CBS special to air Dec. 23 will feature interviews with 12 of the world’s religious leaders, including Yona Metzger, Ashkenazi chief rabbi of Israel.

“In God’s Name” was filmed by French filmmakers and brothers Jules and Gedeon Naudet, whose aim was to explore the diversity of spirituality in modern life. That pursuit took them to Egypt, England, India, Israel, Japan, Lebanon, Russia and the Vatican, as well as Illinois and South Carolina.

Other religious leaders in the film represent Russian Orthodoxy, Hinduism, Islam, Sikhism, Buddhism, the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America and the Church of England.

The two-hour documentary will be broadcast 9 p.m. Dec. 23 on CBS.

Jewish poet wins top literary prize

Poet Juan Gelman won the Cervantes Prize late last month, the Spanish-speaking world’s top literary award.

Gelman, 77, has published more than 20 books of poetry since 1956, and is widely considered to be Argentina’s leading contemporary poet.

His poems address his Jewish heritage, family, Argentina and his painful experience as a political activist during his country’s 1976-83 war against leftist dissent, an ordeal that led to his fleeing Argentina for Europe. — ap

Germany to research stolen art

A new office within Germany’s Institute for Museum Research is opening in January to help identify and research art stolen by the Nazis, Germany’s culture minister said last week.

The office, which comes under the State Museums of Berlin, will help museums, libraries and archives identify items that were taken from their rightful owners during the Nazi period, Culture Minister Bernd Neumann said.

“I expect from this an important push in Germany in the clarifying of restitution questions,” he said.

Neumann founded a working group to look into how to deal with restitution issues, after Berlin sparked controversy with a decision last year to return Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s “Berlin Street Scene” to the heirs of a Jewish collector who said the Nazis forced the family to sell it in the 1930s.

Some art experts questioned whether the expressionist work was sold under duress and whether its return was legal.

With the new office, which has a $1.47 million annual budget, Neumann said he hoped the restitution process would be better coordinated and more transparent. — ap

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