Rabbi Mark L. Winer, senior rabbi at the Jewish Community Center/Kol Ami in White Plains, N.Y., and president of the National Council of Synagogues, will give a public lecture at Cornell University on Thursday, May 9, at 4:15 p.m. at the CafŽ in Anabel Taylor Hall.

His lecture is titled "The Coming Millenium: Opportunity or Threat" and is sponsored by the Cornell Institute for Public Affairs.

Winer has long been committed to enhancing relations between the Jewish and Christian communities. He is the principal American Jewish representative on steering committees between the Jewish people and the Roman Catholic Church, World Council of Churches (Protestant) and the Orthodox Christian Church, and is a member of the Interreligious Coordinating Council in Israel.

In 1993 he arranged meetings between Jewish and Catholic leaders to help resolve the Auschwitz Convent dispute and was one of three world Jewish leaders to attend the signing of the treaty between the Vatican and the state of Israel. That year he also challenged the Orthodox Christian Church of Serbia for its defense of "ethnic cleansing," at an official meeting in Athens between the Jewish people and the Eastern Orthodox Church.

Winer is a graduate of Harvard and Yale universities and Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion.

For more information about Rabbi Winer's visit to Cornell, call Michael Lippmann, a Fellow at the Cornell Institute for Public Affairs, at (607) 277-8374.