The American Jewish Archives Journal, Volume LXI 2009, Number 1

new texts, but the level of aggravation that he and others
scholars must have felt at having to wait for bits and
pieces of new scrolls information can only be imagined. 403
Recounting another incident, Shanks reported that later
in the conference Strugnell described the progress that
was being made on publishing the material:
Strugnell’s report on publication progress was followed,
as were other sessions, by an opportunity for questions. A
question was posed to Strugnell by Ben Zion Wacholder
who recently completed an important book-length study,
entitled The Dawn of Qumran, on the Temple Scroll and
fragments of it already published. Wacholder, a whitehaired
concentration camp survivor, is almost totally blind
(he can tell time by holding his watch to within an inch
of his right eye), so he has perforce almost memorized the contents of the
Temple Scroll and its fragments. His interest in the subject is understandably
keen. He would love to “see”—have read to him, as is his customary method
of learning—a still unpublished fragment of the Temple Scroll. Docilely,
Wacholder asked Strugnell if he knew whether the unpublished fragment
of the Temple Scroll contained any portions of text that were not in the
published scroll and its fragments. 404 Strugnell replied that the unpublished
fragment did contain additional text, but that the new material probably
did not add anything especially significant; he then said, however, that the
unpublished fragment was approximately 25 years older than the published
texts of the Temple Scroll. Grateful, Wacholder thanked Strugnell for
the information. 405
Describing the event in a later interview, Shanks described Wacholder and other
scholars on the outside like him:
‘These guys are sitting around the table wide-eyed,’ Shanks recalled, acidly
mimicking the Eastern European accent of one prominent scholar, ‘Vunderful
… vunderful!’ ‘And they can’t even see the material. Inside they’re seething
with anger.’ 406
Shanks’s recollections are somewhat problematic because his reporting of these
stories deliberately served his propagandist agenda of pushing for the release
of the scrolls. That is, he needed to portray Wacholder as the sympathetic old
man. In fact, Wacholder would use a similar tactic in his sole description of
these events. In a 1991 interview, when asked why he pushed so hard to have the
scrolls released, Wacholder’s response was consistent with Shanks’s view: “‘I’m
sick and tired of all this waiting,’ he said. Wacholder said he would not live to
see many more texts at the rate the translators [sic] are releasing them.” 407
58 • American Jewish Archives Journal
Ben Zion Wacholder,
Cincinnati, Undated
(Courtesy American
Jewish Archives)