Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Thursday that a
years-long spat with the United States over thousands of Jewish religious
writings should end now that some are on display in Moscow's new Jewish museum.
Russia has resisted calls to return the so-called Schneerson
collection to the New York-based Hasidic Chabad-Lubavitch group, descendants of
the last private owner of the writings, and Putin said they were part of
Russia's cultural heritage.
"For the Jewish people, Russia has been a homeland for
centuries, as it remains so today," Putin said while visiting the museum
to launch its latest exhibition.
"I hope that moving the Schneerson library to the
Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center ... will put an end to this problem once and
for all," said the former KGB spy, who has sought to celebrate Russia as
country of many religions while fostering close ties with the Russian Orthodox
Church.
The Schneerson collection consists of thousands of Jewish
books, religious papers and manuscripts, some of them dating back to the 16th
century, their leather-covered spines showing the effects of age.
The 4,425 books that will be kept at the museum include
editions of the Torah and Talmud with unique margin notes by Hasidic leaders of
the Chabad-Lubavitch community, which considers the whole collection its
inheritance.
They were left for safekeeping from the turmoil of the World
War One in a warehouse in what is now western Russia's Smolensk province, but
later were taken by the newly installed Bolshevik state and finally kept in
Russia's state library until recently.
"Jewish books should be held in Jewish
organizations," said Alexander Boroda, head of the Russian Federation of
Jewish Communities and the museum's director.
"It is a restoration of historical justice that they
will be managed by the Jewish community."
The 500 books that have been brought to the museum are held
in glass-covered bookstalls in a room with regulated humidity and temperature
set at 18 degrees C (64 F) to preserve the paper. The rest are to be moved
there by the end of the year.
Dispute
It remains unclear whether the move will defuse the
diplomatic and legal tug-of-war that started even before the 1991 collapse of
the Soviet Union and has weighed on bilateral ties between Moscow and
Washington.
Moscow reacted angrily when a U.S. judge ruled in January
that Russia should pay $50,000 a day in fines for failure to return the books.
Chabad-Lubavitch declined to comment on the matter, while
the U.S. ambassador to Moscow said talks were still ongoing.
"We continue to work with all sides - and there are
many sides in this discussion - on a resolution that will be acceptable to all
sides, and irrespective of what happened today we continue to do that,"
Ambassador Michael McFaul said.
Another part of the Schneerson collection rests in Russia's
military archive after being confiscated by Soviet troops in Nazi Germany
during World War Two.
Those papers had fallen into Nazi hands after their last
private owner, the late Chabad-Lubavitch rabbi Yosef Schneerson, fled the
Soviet Union in late 1920s and wandered around eastern Europe in search of a
safe place.
The Chabad-Lubavitch community originated under the Russian
Empire and Yosef Schneerson was born to it in 1880. He set up the collection to
bring together religious books and writings of his kin before fleeing for New
York where he died in 1950.
Up to 1 million Jews live in Russia after the population
dwindled in tsarist-era pogroms, Soviet oppression of religion and emigration
in recent decades.
No comments:
Post a Comment