JTA - 12.17.2004

Lantos urges Putin to return Chabad books

(JTA) -- A congressman urged Vladimir Putin to return precious holy works to the Chabad movement. 

In a letter Thursday, Rep. Tom Lantos (D-Calif.) urged the Russian president to meet commitments to return about 12,000 books seized by Russian troops in Warsaw in 1945. The late Rabbi Menachem Schneerson, spiritual leader of the Chabad movement, abandoned the books when he fled the Nazis. Chabad, which had presumed that the Nazis destroyed the books, only recently discovered that they in fact were in Moscow. Russian authorities have allowed access to only eight of the books, said Lantos, the ranking Democrat on the U.S. House of Representatives’ International Relations Committee. 

“The Schneerson archives and books are in dire physical danger and desperately need to be properly preserved by experts,” he wrote. “The Russian government has denied repeated attempts by Chabad experts to view and to catalogue them properly. This unreasoning refusal of the Russian government disregards the basic principles of human rights, respect for religion and the pursuit of faith.