Interfax
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U.S. Refuses to Return 7 Chabad Books to Russia

The U.S. officially refused in 2013 to return seven books from the so-called Schneerson Library, i.e., a collection of old Jewish books and manuscripts built by Rabbi Yosef Yitzhak Schneerson in the Russian Empire at the end of the 19th century, that were lent to it in 1994, said an attorney representing the Russian State Library and the Culture Ministry in a lawsuit against the U.S. Library of Congress at hearings at the Moscow Arbitration Court on Thursday.

“The demand for the return was turned down last March,” he said.

The seven books from the collection that were earlier lent to the U.S. are especially valuable, the attorney said. “The books should have been returned by now, as the contract has already expired,” he said.

The Russian State Library is seeking the return of the seven books from the Schneerson collection by the Library of Congress.

Agudas Chassiden Chabad, the nonprofit organization to which the books were lent, is acting as the third party in the litigation.

Part of the Schneerson book collection was nationalized by Bolsheviks in 1918 and eventually joined the collection of the Russian State Library, known earlier as the Lenin Library. Schneerson managed to take the other part of the collection out of the Soviet Union while emigrating in the 1930s.

About 25,000 pages of manuscripts from the collection were later seized by the Nazis, then were regained by the Red Army and handed over to the Russian State Military Archive.

The New York-based Chabad-Lubavitch religious community has been seeking the Schneerson collection’s handover since the end of the 1980s.

On August 6, 2010, a federal judge in Washington, Royce Lamberth, ruled that the Hasidim proved the legitimacy of their claims to the ancient Jewish books and manuscripts, which, in his definition, are kept at the Russian State Library and the Russian Military Archive illegally.

The Russian Foreign Ministry challenged the judgment.

It was reported on January 17, 2013 that a U.S. district court in Washington had ruled to oblige Russia to pay $50,000 a day as a fine until the Schneerson collection is returned to Chabad-Lubavitch based on the 2010 court order.

A judge in Washington ruled on June 20, 2013 that Russia’s refusal to give the Schneerson collection to the U.S. Hasidic community was inappropriate and unlawful.

The Russian Culture Ministry and the Russian State Library filed a suit with the Moscow Court of Arbitration, seeking to oblige the U.S. Library of Congress to return the seven books from the Schneerson collection, which had been stored at the Russian State Library and were lent to it in 1994 for temporary use under the international library exchange system.

President Vladimir Putin said some time ago that the library’s handover to the U.S. was impossible and proposed placing it with the Jewish Tolerance Center in Moscow to make it available to anyone.

All the 4,500 books from the Schneerson collection should be handed over to the Jewish Tolerance Center. The books stored at the Russian State Library are currently being inventoried, scanned and digitized. It was planned to scan from 500 to 700 of these books monthly.