Chabad Wants Books Back - 04.04.2005

April 4, 2005 -	Congress presses Russia on Lubavitch books
March 28, 2005 -	CSCE To Hold Hearing on Russian Books
March 12, 2005 -	Chabad Battles Russia for Trove of Works
February 22, 2005 -	Chabad Sues To Recover Russian Books
February 18, 2005 -	Russia Urged to Return Chabad Books
January 20, 2005	Rice Backs Return of Religious Texts
December 17, 2004 -	Lantos Wants Chabad Books Returned
December 12, 2002 -	Russia Returns Some Books to Lubavitch

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JTA - 04.04.2005

Congress ups pressure on Russia to return trove of Lubavitch books

By Matthew E. Berger

WASHINGTON (JTA) -- Pressure is mounting in the United States for the Russian government to return a collection of books to the Chabad movement. 

A month after all 100 U.S. senators urged Russian President Vladimir Putin to release the "Schneerson Collection," a congressional committee was slated Wednesday to explore the collection's significance and the efforts to bring it to the United States. 

"It is time for the Helsinki Commission to stop writing letters and have a hearing where the story can be told," said Sean Woo, chief of staff of the Helsinki Commission, which monitors human rights and religious freedom around the world. 

Even as U.S. lawmakers pay increasing attention to the issue, it is also causing some disagreement between Lubavitch leaders in the United States, who are pushing to have the books returned, and those in Russia, who don't want to jeopardize their close relations with the Kremlin. 

There's obvious frustration among some Lubavitch leaders in the United States, who have garnered near unanimous support from American officials but have made only the slightest progress with the Russians. The hope is that increased publicity about the case will pressure the Putin government to release the collection. 

"It is an opportunity to educate and to highlight this struggle and the history of these books in a way that has not been approached as yet," said Rabbi Chanim Cunin, spokesman for the West Coast Chabad Lubavitch, which is leading the effort. 

Cunin's father, Rabbi Shlomo Cunin, was due to testify before the Helsinki Commission, along with a broad panel that includes actor Jon Voight, a Lubavitch supporter. 

The Schneerson collection contains about 12,000 volumes seized from the fifth Lubavitcher rebbe, Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Schneerson, as part of a crackdown on religion a few years after the Russian Revolution. 

Thirty books were given to the Lubavitch movement in Russia in 2002 from the Russian State Library, formerly known as the Lenin Library, where the collection has been held for the past 80 years. 

There was hope at the time that more of the books would be released. Despite assurances, however, the remaining volumes in the library have not been released. 

Last November, the Lubavitch movement in California filed suit in a U.S. court against the Russian Federation, Russian Ministry of Culture and Mass Communication, the Russian State Library and the Russian State Military Archive. 

A 1991 ruling by the Russian Supreme Court found that the collection was Chabad property, but Russian officials contend that the books are Russian property and will be taken overseas if they're given to Chabad. 

Chabad leaders indeed want to bring the collection to New York, where the books can be studied at Lubavitch headquarters. There was hope that the Putin government would hand them over, but these hopes have waned recently. As frustration has grown, the lobbying campaign has resumed. 

The goal now is to retrieve the collection before Russia's celebration in May of the 60th anniversary of Nazi Germany's surrender in World War II. Cunin said the collection includes personal tales that document Soviet oppression of Schneerson and his followers, as well as Nazi atrocities in Poland. 

An official with the Russian Ministry of Culture said he wasn't aware of any plan to have the Schneerson books transferred to the Lubavitch movement in the United States. 

"At present, this is not being discussed," said the official, who spoke to JTA on condition of anonymity. "There is no Russian law that would make such transfer legal. Should the government tell us to have the books transferred, we will have to obey. But I doubt this will ever happen." 

In September 2003 the Russian State Library opened a new Jewish book room, partly to make it easier for readers to use books from the Lubavitch collection. 

Chabad-Lubavitch was outraged, saying Russia should not have opened the collection to the public until the books had been returned to Jewish control. 

Lubavitch officials in Russia are divided over the issue. 

Spearheading the effort to have the books returned to New York is Rabbi Yitzhak Kogan, a Moscow representative of Agudas Chasidei Chabad-Lubavitch of the Former Soviet Union. That group was appointed by the last Lubavitcher rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, with the goal of freeing the books. 

But some Lubavitch leaders in Russia say the issue is more nuanced. The issue has put Rabbi Berel Lazar, the leading Chabad official in Russia and one of the country's two chief rabbis -- who is known for his good ties to the Kremlin -- in an awkward situation. 

Reluctant to irritate the Kremlin, Lazar's Federation of Jewish Communities in Russia advocated transferring the books not to the United States but to the federation's main facility in Moscow -- a proposal that outraged the elder Cunin and his supporters. 

A spokesman for the Federation of Jewish Communities told JTA that the question of justice in the case is not simple. 

"The issue should be resolved in a lawful manner, in full accord with Russian legislation," Boruch Gorin said. "And here is the main question: What would be considered lawful in this situation?" 

Some insist Russia had no legal grounds to hold the books because Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Schneerson simply left them for temporary storage at a warehouse in Moscow when he left the Soviet Unioin decades ago. 

These people argue that the collection was nationalized when Schneerson was living abroad, along with other books from the warehouse. 

"If that was so, then the books should be returned," Gorin said. But if the books were nationalized and taken from their original owners, then the issue should be resolved in a broader manner that deals with the entire problem of de-nationalization of seized property, he said. 

In post-Communist years, Russia failed to adopt comprehensive legislation on the restitution of former private property, including cultural assets. 

Officials with the state library and the Ministry of Culture have indicated that they would oppose an attempt to undo the nationalization of cultural assets. Numerous holdings in Russian libraries and museums were nationalized, and comprehensive legislation could lead to an avalanche of claims. 

The U.S. Senate first called unanimously for the collection to be returned to Chabad in 1992, and successive American presidents raised the issue with Russian leaders Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin. 

President Bush reportedly raised the issue with Putin last month at a summit in Bratislava, Slovakia. U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice also said, during her confirmation hearings in January, that she would "very much push" the Russian government to return the documents. 

The issue has not garnered much attention among American Jewish groups, however. 

Edward O'Donnell, the State Department's special envoy for Holocaust issues, was slated to address Wednesday's hearing, along with leaders and attorneys for the Chabad-Lubavitch movement and Leon Fuerth, who was national security adviser to former Vice President Al Gore. 

Voigt is a strong supporter of the California Lubavitch community, and Cunin said the actor had been involved in the Schneerson collection effort since 1991. 

Russia's ambassador to the United States was invited to participate, but was not expected to attend. 

(JTA correspondent Lev Krichevsky in Moscow contributed to this report.)

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Los Angeles Times - 03.12.2005

Los Angeles Times

Chabad Battles Russia for Trove of Works


After exhausting other avenues, rabbis and attorneys go to court in L.A. seeking all of a Lubavitch collection compiled over 200 years.

By Veronica Torrejón, Times Staff Writer

While it remains out of reach in Russia, a centuries-old collection of Jewish religious books and letters evokes an image of a distant light for Rabbi Boruch Shlomo Cunin.

"No one can hold them in their arms, no one can glean the spark of the light and the warmth that are contained within the aging pages of these books," said Cunin, West Coast director of Chabad, the Lubavitch organization of ultra-Orthodox Hasidic Jews that recently sued the Russian Federation in federal court in Los Angeles to obtain the 12,000-volume collection. 

The light, he adds, is also a guide for a second generation of rabbis and attorneys working to force Russian officials to have the books and papers moved to a Lubavitch library in New York where they would be available to scholars.

"The torch has been passed," Cunin said.

The works, assembled over more than two centuries by the movement originating in the Belarussian town of Lubavitch, have been at the center of a diplomatic tussle since 1990. 

Russian officials have given selected volumes over the years to Lubavitch leaders. But despite pledges of support for Chabad from former Russian leaders Boris Yeltsin and Mikhail Gorbachev and three U.S. presidents, the agencies in control of the books have shown no signs of handing over the entire collection, which they say is the property of Russia and should not be transferred overseas. 

After spearheading the effort for years, Cunin has since ceded some responsibility for garnering political support in Washington to his sons Chaim Cunin, 30, and Yosef Cunin, 32, both also rabbis.

"It's a message to the Russians that we have enough belief in the younger generation," said the elder Cunin. "We will never, never stop until we get back the last book, the last manuscript, the last picture."

On Chabad's legal front is Marshall Grossman, 65, whose work for the organization over the years has been mostly pro bono. Now, aided by a second generation of attorneys in the Santa Monica firm of Alschuler Grossman Stein & Kahan, Grossman hopes the Los Angeles lawsuit will force a response from Russia. The suit, filed in November, names the Russian Federation and the Russian Ministry of Culture, state library and military archive as plaintiffs.

Though the Russian Supreme Court ordered the documents returned in 1991, the order was never obeyed, according to the Chabad court filings. 

"We are operating here on both a political and legal field," said Grossman, a friend of Cunin. The Los Angeles case was filed "with great reservation because we had hoped to accomplish this through the Russian legal system." 

The Russian Ministry of Culture plans to formally respond at the end of the month, said James Broderick Jr. of Squire Sanders & Dempsey, the American firm recently retained to represent the ministry.

"We are just coming into this case," said attorney Sarah Carey in Washington, who is working with Broderick on the matter. "We've gotten bits and pieces, but the pieces that we've gotten aren't complete. The Russian position, stated simply, is that Russia owns the collection and that it should remain in Russia." 

Broderick and Carey argue that sovereign immunity shields the Russian Ministry of Culture from a suit filed in U.S. court, a position that Chabad disputes. 

"We can say that the Russian government is concerned about the idea of this kind of an issue being the subject of litigation in the United States," Broderick said. "Suppose a suit was filed in Russia to recover manuscripts being held in the Library of Congress?" 

Repeated attempts this week to obtain comment from the Russian Embassy in Washington were unsuccessful. 

The saga of the documents dates to the early 20th century. According to the lawsuit, the chief Lubavitcher rabbi at the time sent a collection of books and manuscripts to Moscow during World War I for safekeeping. In the aftermath of the Russian Revolution, it was reportedly taken by Soviet officials and placed in the Russian State Library.

The second part of the collection, handwritten letters and records, was maintained by the next rabbi to head the Lubavitcher movement until he was forced to flee Poland during World War II, leaving the collection behind. The Soviet army seized parts of it after the war and placed the documents in storage at the Russian Military Archive, where they remain, the Lubavitchers say.

For the two younger attorneys now on the case for Chabad, Jonathan Stern, 28, and Seth Gerber, 32, the cause is part of a larger tapestry of political and Jewish activism passed down by their families. 

Leading up to his bar mitzvah 15 years ago, Stern engaged in a letter-writing campaign on behalf of a Russian teenager who was attempting to immigrate to Israel. Gerber can recall handing out fliers, as early as age 5, during demonstrations organized by his parents in support of Jewish emigration from Russia.

For Stern, buried somewhere in the trove of books is knowledge "about living a life that strives toward ethical and moral perfection." Gerber is similarly intrigued by the books' content. 

Grossman, whose grandparents emigrated from Russia, made his first trip to the Soviet Union in 1961 during the height of the Cold War. The trip marked a turning point in his life.

In Moscow, he met an engineer named Jacob who spoke of being persecuted as a Jew and of it being dangerous for him to be seen with Westerners. When he returned home, Grossman learned that an engineer named Jacob had been executed.

"I don't know if it was the same man," he said. "But I've been haunted by it to this day." 

In 1990, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneersohn, the seventh leader in the Chabad movement's history, charged the elder Cunin and a delegation of four others with the responsibility of retrieving the collection.

Later, the younger Cunins and their four other brothers, ranging in age from 14 to 22, were sent from Los Angeles to Chabad headquarters in New York. There, Schneersohn tapped them to take their cause to Washington to lobby for support from Congress. 

"Thus began this journey of ours," Chaim Cunin said. "We know that our job in life is to pursue the path of justice. Even though we may have not yet been successful, we know that the journey is just as important."

He and Yosef, who have now spent almost half their lives in pursuit of the collection, are married with seven children between them. When they are not lobbying in Washington, they help their father run the Chabad's West Coast network of synagogues, social service centers and schools.

Both generations of Cunins and the attorneys helping them believe that the collection will be relinquished in their lifetimes.

"I am fulfilling the most urgent mission the rebbe entrusted [to] me, and now my children are doing the same," the elder Cunin said. "How are they going to get rid of me? I've got 13 kids, and their kids will be no less determined."