Diplomat: Russia has right for response in US dispute over Jewish collection

angelburst29

The Living Force
It would be a kind gesture, if the U.S. and the New York based Chabad-Lubavitch group would return Jewish texts that were loaned to the US Library of Congress in 1991 but never returned, while President Putin is visiting N.Y. for his U.N. address?

Diplomat: Russia has right for tit-for-tat response in US dispute over Jewish collection
http://tass.ru/en/politics/821835

Russia demands that the US hand back seven Jewish texts from the Russian State Library in Moscow that were loaned to the US Library of Congress in 1991 but were never returned.

Moscow has a legal right to insist on the arrest of US property as "symmetric response" in the Russia-US decades-long dispute over the ownership of Hasidic texts, Russian president's envoy for international cultural cooperation Mikhail Shvydkoi has said.

The texts were handed on to the New York-based Hasidic Chabad-Lubavitch group, which claims the rightful ownership of the books, which were nationalized by Soviet Russia. Moscow said there were no legal heirs in the Schneerson family.

"Russia has the full legal right to launch a symmetric procedure and insist on the arrest of the US property in security for the return of these books and insist on levying penalties," Shvydkoi said.

Now the so-called Schneerson Library has moved to the Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center in Moscow under supervision of Russia’s Hasidic community. The collection includes 12,000 books and 50,000 rare documents.

The envoy says there is no evidence that the collection belongs to the US Hasidic community. "In fact, the books from the Schneerson Library are available for Hasids from around the world," he said.


Russian state exhibits to US on hold for next few years — culture envoy
http://tass.ru/en/society/821540

The reasons are the disputed Schneerson Library collection and the YUKOS case.

Russian-American museum exchange stopped completely following the dispute over the so-called Schneerson Library collection. In late July 2011, the US court ordered return of about 12,000 books and 50 rare documents from the Schneerson collection, started by Rabbi Joseph Schneerson in the Russian city of Lyubavichi. Part of the collection was nationalized by Soviet Russia as there were no legal heirs in the Schneerson family.

Schneerson managed to take the other part of the collection out of the Soviet Union while emigrating in the 1930s. About 25,000 pages of manuscripts from the collection were later seized by the Nazis, then were regained by the Red Army and handed over to the Russian State Military Archive.

Chabad-Lubavitch, an Orthodox Jewish movement headquarted in New York, seeks the handover of the Schneerson collection, as collected by the early rabbinic leaders of Chabad.

"We believed from the very beginning that the American court could not decide on the property of the Russian Federation that has never left Russia, the Schneerson Library. We see this lawsuit as insignificant," Shvydkoi said.

"Nevertheless the collision is in the judge’s passing the verdict despite a recommendation of the Department of State which said this decision would damage relations between the United States and Russia," he continued. The court disregarded it, passing the verdict that Russia was to pay a fine of about 43 million dollars, he continued.
 
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