AUSTIN-St. Edward's University will present the first Nostra Aetate (In Our Time) Award to Rabbi Irving "Yitz" Greenberg at 7 p.m. on Tues., Oct. 24 in the Mabee Ballroom of the Ragsdale Center at St. Edward's University. Greenberg will be the featured speaker at the ceremony, which is sponsored by St. Edward's University and The Jewish Community Association of Austin..

The Nostra Aetate award, which will be presented annually, honors outstanding individuals whose lives and life's work epitomize the inter-religious values reflected in the groundbreaking Vatican II (1965) document of the same name. Award recipients are honored for their commitment to dialogue, understanding, and reconciliation between Jews and Christians. Greenberg is the president of Jewish Life Network, a foundation whose mission is to create new institutions and initiatives to enrich the religious, cultural, and institutional lives of American Jewry. He also serves as chairman of the United States Holocaust Memorial Council, which is responsible for the U. S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C.

Greenberg, an ordained Orthodox rabbi, earned his Ph.D. from Harvard University and has been a seminal thinker in confronting the Holocaust as a historical transforming event. In his book, Interpreters of Judaism in the Late Twentieth Century, Professor Steven T. Katz wrote, "No Jewish thinker has had a greater impact on the American Jewish community in the last two decades than Irving Yitz Greenberg."

Visit the university's event calendar on the Internet at http://www.stedwards.edu/univrel/calendar.

St. Edward's University is an independent, Catholic liberal arts university of 3,800 students in Austin. It was founded by the Congregation of the Holy Cross.

Note: (electronic image of Greenberg available upon request.)