By Laura Ziegler
Kansas City, MO – Rabbi Morris Margolis has hundreds, if not thousands of books on the shelves of his first floor library. On a top shelf, behind his solid wooden desk, is a very rare and special volume. It's one volume of the Dead Sea Scrolls, with Hebrew text, and pictures of the fragments of scrolls .some tiny corners of a page .as they were discovered in caves of Qumran near the Dead Sea, beginning in 1947. Rabbi Margolis, who has read every word of the scrolls, in Hebrew, can barely contain his excitement as he turns the yellowed pages, and tells the fantastic tale of how the mysterious scrolls were pieced together.
Next February, parts of the Dead Sea Scrolls will be displayed at Union Station, in a traveling exhibit by the Israel Antiquities Authority. It contains some fragments that have never before left Israel, and officials at Union Station hope the Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit ---expected to draw 150-thousand visitors---will prove Science City is a viable regional destination point. Archaeologists consider the Dead Sea Scrolls among the most important findings of the 20th century. They represent the oldest, and most comprehensive writings of the Jewish Bible, the Old Testament.