Hasidim gain vs. Russia

Hasidim gain vs. Russia
NEWS WIRE SERVICES
Sunday, December 10th, 2006

A judge ruled last week that he has authority to decide whether Russia should return a historic collection of important Hasidic writings to the Brooklyn-based Lubavitchers.

U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth said the collection of 25,000 pages of handwritten rabbinical teachings and other material dating to the founding of the Hasidic movement in the 18th century was illegally seized by the Nazis in Poland before being taken back to the Soviet Union by the Red Army.

The documents were described in testimony in Federal Court in Washington as "the crown jewels" of the Hasidic movement. They were taken to Latvia and later Poland after Rabbi Joseph Isaac Schneersohn, then the Lubavitcher rebbe, fled Bolshevik Russia in 1927.

When the Nazis invaded Poland, Schneersohn fled to the United States, where he established the Lubavitcher movement's headquarters in Crown Heights. He was forced to leave behind the archives and manuscripts, which were seized and taken to Germany.

The Soviet Army recovered the documents in 1945 and returned them to Russia, where they are being held in the Russia State Military Archives.

"Either Nazi Germany's taking of the archive or its taking by the Soviet Army in Poland in 1945 constitutes a taking in violation of international law," Lamberth said in an order Monday asserting his court's jurisdiction over the case.

Lamberth said that the documents fall under the "takings" exception to the Foreign Sovereign Immunity Act, which otherwise prohibits lawsuits against foreign governments from being heard in U.S. courts except in certain circumstances.

The judge said, however, that he has no authority to rule on a library of 12,000 books and 381 manuscripts that also belonged to the Lubavitcher rebbes that was seized by the Bolsheviks in 1924 for the Russian State Library where it remains. Because that seizure occurred within Russia's borders at the time, it was not subject to international law, Lamberth ruled.

Last week's ruling is part of a 90-year battle for control of a religious literary collection that survived the Holocaust and decades of Soviet denial of the material's very existence. Expressions of concern from every U.S. senator and from former President Bill Clinton have so far failed to move Russian authorities, who say the materials are important to Russia's history and should remain in the country.

"We are gratified that the court has recognized the legitimacy of Chabad's case," said Marshall Grossman, an attorney for the Lubavitchers.

Members of Agudas Chasidei Chabad are usually called Lubavitcher Hasids because the movement was founded in Lubavitch, Russia, in 1775. It was incorporated under Schneersohn in New York as a nonprofit in 1940, and is now one of the largest Orthodox Jewish movements in the world.

Since 1775, the Lubavitchers have been led by seven rebbes. The most recent was Schneersohn's son-in-law, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, who died in 1994 and has not been replaced.

Sholom Dovber Levin, the Lubavitchers' head librarian, told Bloomberg News that the group is considering its next step, including a possible appeal of the ruling on the part of the collection held not to be subject to international law.

Levin said the materials now held in Russia were used to pass down sacred traditions from generation to generation, and many contain handwritten notes left by the rebbes.

"Our efforts for more than 20 years have been mainly focused on the library itself," Levin said. "These books are the core of the library. They are worth nothing to the Russians. They are sacred to us."