When President Clinton returned to Washington last month from his European trip, seven rare books accompanied him on Air Force One.
The books were from the highly sought-after Lubavitch library that had been confiscated by the Russian State Library some seven decades ago.
A team of Lubavitcher Chasidim, led by Rabbi Boruch Shlomo Cunin of Los Angeles, has been endeavoring to bring the books — all 12,000 of them — to the Lubavitcher rebbe in Brooklyn.
Cunin returned to Moscow last month for Clinton’s summit with Russian President Boris Yeltsin.
“President Clinton pushed them (the Russians) very hard” on the books, the rabbi said.
Cunin also met with Strobe Talbott, U.S. ambassador at large and Russia specialist and now the president’s nominee to be deputy secretary of state.
Talbott has been an integral part of an international effort to obtain the library, which has scarcely any monetary value but is priceless to the Chabad Lubavitch movement.
The seven books — another book from the collection was obtained by Vice President Al Gore in December — were brought to America on a circuitous route.
This latest delivery of books was turned over by the Russians not to the Lubavitch community but to the Library of Congress, which had requested the books from the Russian State Library on behalf of the Lubavitchers.
The roster of those trying to get the books from Moscow to Brooklyn reads like a guest list for a state dinner: Talbott; Gore; Sens. Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.); Joseph Lieberman (D-Conn.); George Mitchell (D-Maine), the Senate majority leader; and Bob Dole (R-Kans.), the Senate minority leader.
Also, Anthony Lake, assistant to the president for national security affairs; Leon Furth, the vice president’s assistant for national security affairs; and Rep. Howard Berman (D-Calif.), who is chairman of the subcommittee on international operations of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs and U.S. liaison to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization.
Last Thursday, Cunin and the senators gathered at a meeting at the Library of Congress that was hosted by James Billington, the chief librarian, and including Russian Ambassador Vladimir Lukin.
The senators praised the Russians for turning over the seven books, but Cunin called it “a beautiful gesture but nothing more than a gesture.”
The rabbi said the Russian ambassador promised last Thursday that by the following morning he would “arrange to have the books released” to the Lubavitchers and “work immediately to free the entire collection.”
The seven books were released as promised, and Cunin brought them to the rebbe in Brooklyn on Monday.
Cunin has now also enlisted the attention of UNESCO, which just held a weeklong meeting in Moscow to discuss repairing the Russian State Library.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
