A proposal by Russian President Vladimir Putin for solving a bitter, decades-long legal battle over the late Lubavitcher Rebbe’s library, long held in Moscow, has pitted Russia’s Chabad-Lubavitch community against its U.S. brethren.
Nathan Lewin, the lawyer spearheading the Brooklyn-based Chabad movement’s lawsuit against the Russian state, dismissed Putin’s February 19 suggestion to keep the collection in a Chabad-controlled Jewish library in Moscow. “Chabad is the rightful owner of the collection, and its return to the United States is the only acceptable outcome that is consistent with the clear directives of the [deceased] Lubavitcher rebbe, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson,” Lewin said in a statement.”
But in an interview with the Forward, Boruch Gorin, a spokesman in Russia for Chabad’s Federation of Jewish Communities, criticized Lewin’s dismissal as “aggressive.” Alluding to anti-Semitism that could be stoked by the Chabad lawsuit, Gorin called Lewin’s dismissal of Putin’s proposed compromise “dangerous [for] the future of the Jewish community in Russia.”
“To answer simply ‘no’ — that looks very strange and, let’s say, not too friendly to Russian Jews,” Gorin said.
Chabad’s followers see the Schneerson Library, a collection of books amassed by the early rabbinic leaders of the Chabad Hasidic movement, as integral to the movement’s religious and spiritual foundation.
Gorin said that Putin’s gesture was the first instance since the collapse of the Soviet Union in which a Russian leader has stated publicly that he is “ready to compromise” on the Schneerson Library.
“I think it’s a very important thing, and we believe it is not only a mistake, but a tragic mistake, not to understand that,” Gorin said.
He said that Berel Lazar, Chabad’s chief rabbi in Russia, has written to Chabad leaders in the United States, urging a face-to-face meeting in America to discuss the matter.
The Schneerson Library is one-half of the so-called Schneerson Collection, which has been the subject of an acrimonious and drawn-out legal battle between Chabad and the Russian state.
The library consists of thousands of books amassed by the first five leaders of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement, which was based throughout most of the 19th century in Lyubavichi, Russia. The Bolsheviks seized the library during the Russian Revolution in 1917 and nationalized it.
The other half of the collection is the Schneerson archive — books and manuscripts and handwritten documents of the sixth Lubavitcher rebbe, Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn, who escaped Eastern Europe at the start of World War II. The archive was seized by the Nazis and then captured by the Red Army.
Chabad has sought for the library and archive to be returned as a single entity, but Gorin believes that this would be a mistake.
He said that Chabad in America ought to concentrate on seeking the return of the archive, given earlier precedents for the return of Nazi-looted property to its owners.
Russia has been much more reticent to release property seized by the Bolsheviks, especially overseas. In recent years, the Kremlin’s return of property to the Russian Orthodox Church, including churches, monasteries and religious items, has been highly controversial.
Gorin said that Putin’s suggestion for the articles seized by the Bolsheviks — to be housed in Moscow’s Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center — was a good compromise.
The $50 million museum, which opened to great fanfare last November, was bankrolled by oligarchs close to the Kremlin and is controlled by Chabad in Russia.
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