MOSCOW (JTA) — Escalating the legal dispute between Russia and the United States over the Schneerson collection of Jewish texts, prosecutors in Moscow sought an arrest warrant for an American rabbi.
Join our WhatsApp groupSubscribe to our Daily Roundup Email
The request for an international arrest warrant against Rabbi Shalom Dov-Ber Levine, the director and curator at the Central Chabad-Lubavitch Research Library, was reported on Wednesday by the news site MK. He is wanted for “failing to return cultural property” to Russia.
According to the report, the move is connected to seven manuscripts from the Schneerson library, a historic collection of 12,000 books and 50,000 documents named for Rabbi Joseph I. Schneerson, who led the Chabad Hasidic movement until his death in 1950.
Russia’s state archive is holding the collection inside the Jewish Museum of Moscow. In 2013, a U.S. judge ordered Russia to pay $50,000 a day in fines for failing to honor a 2010 ruling by the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., to hand over to the New York-based movement the entire library.
But Russia insists the library is part of its national heritage. In 2014, a Russian court demanded that the U.S. Library of Congress hand back seven precious Jewish texts to Moscow – and, in a tit-for-tat ruling, said it should pay a massive fine for every day it delays.
The request for an arrest warrant is over those seven books, which Chabad loaned in 1991 to the Library of Congress, MK reported.
Nebech. Hitler YM’S also wanted to make a Jewish Museum after he would anhiliate the Jewish Race. It really makes sense that Russia is claiming Lubavitch’s huge library as it’s “Heritage”.Russia really supported Yiddishkeit after 1917 when the Bolsheviks took power!
Nebach. It makes a lot of sense to support Putin loving T. Both Germans and Russian did a lot for” Yiddishkeit” in the 20th Century
I did some research. Actually, Lenin was a staunch supporter of equal rights, anti-semitism was criminalized & the Yidden were protected until 1923. Unfortunately, Lenin got sick; Lenin wanted Stalin out, because among other reasons, he was an anti-semite, but Stalin kept Lenin’s final “Will” hidden, and assumed power. Stalin was a paranoid psychopath who supported the State of Israel as long as he believed they would support the USSR against the United States. When Golda Meyer visited Moscow in the early 50’s as an emissary from Israel & thousands of Jews greeted her singing Am Yisroel Chai, coupled with his enemy Trotsky, his hatred against Jews was cemented. Both his daughter & son married Jews (against Stalin’s wishes). He hated intelligent, multilingual & educated people (Stalin was a peasant), so when he murdered the Poets & the Doctors, it’s hard to say his motivation was anti-Semitic per se. There was no such doubt when he ordered his security service purged of Jews.