Rabbis Rap Exhibit

TORONTO — The Toronto Board of Rabbis (TBR) is urging the Jewish community to avoid a new exhibit of “plastinated” human cadavers now on display at the Ontario Science Centre. The travelling Body Worlds exhibit, featuring “over 200 authentic human specimens including whole-body plastinates, organs and translucent body slices,” is one that “goes against basic Jewish belief and constitutes nivul hamet (desecration of the body),” the TBR said. The board, comprising mostly Conservative and Reform clergy, urged Jewish schools and Jewish public school students to stay away. It said donors’ consent to have their remains displayed is irrelevant, since Judaism holds that “our bodies are on loan from the Divine. Respect for the body and prompt burial are mandated, not desecration and display.” The Science Centre also hosted a controversial Body Worlds exhibit in 2005.

Dal Honours Schulich

HALIFAX — Dalhousie University honoured Toronto billionaire Seymour Schulich last week for his $20-million gift to its law faculty by renaming it the Schulich School of Law. Most of the gift will go to create 41 scholarships, the school said. Schulich has also made major donations to York University in Toronto, McGill University in Montreal, the University of Western Ontario, the University of Calgary and Haifa’s Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, which renamed its chemistry faculty in his honour.