In the midst of a turbulent week in Russian politics, Lubavitcher Hasidim won a small victory here.
For the first time in nearly 70 years, Lubav-itch rabbis laid eyes on some of the books that once belonged to the father-in-law of their current rebbe, Rabbi Menachem Schneerson.
The Lubavitchers have been trying for nearly two years to recover the collection of roughly 12,000 volumes of religious books and manuscripts, which were seized by Communist authorities during the Russian Revolution and have been languishing in the Russian Library since 1919.
Rabbi Boruch Cunin of Los Angeles, who has spearheaded the recovery effort, visited what until recently was called the Lenin Library last week with some 30 other Lubavitchers from Russia, the United States and Israel.
“It was incredible happiness and pain all at once. I held a 200-year-old manuscript in my hands,” said Cunin.
The visit was made possible by Russian Culture Minister Evgeny Sidorov, who early this month gave Cunin a letter authorizing the Lubavitchers to inspect the collection.
But as has so often happened in the Chabad movement’s long struggle to regain the books, there was bad feeling on both sides in this round.
“The librarians were not cooperative,” said Cunin. “At first, they showed us what purported to be a catalogue of the Schneerson collection, but it listed only about 600 books. Nevertheless, we selected 50 or so to look at.
“By the end of the day, the librarians brought out only 19. And they assigned us only four places in the reading room,” he said.
“It’s impossible to work at the library under those conditions,” Cunin declared. “And there was harassment. Some lunatic came up to me and showed me a swastika, saying, ‘We’re going to finish what Hitler left off.'”
CONSIDERED ‘NATIONAL TREASURES’
The librarians saw things differently.
“They were praying very loudly,” complained librarian Mary Trifanenko. “We can’t have that in the reading room. And they wanted to take pictures, but that requires special permission.”
Chabad was nearly successful in obtaining the collection’s release in the liberal atmosphere following the failed hard-line Communist coup of August 1991. But the matter became mired in conflicting court decisions and political wrangling.
In February, 1992, Chabad activists briefly occupied the library to stress their demands, a move that, in the view of one source familiar with the matter, “only alienated those who might otherwise have been disposed to help them.”
Last week Deputy Culture Minister Tatyana Nikitina told a local Moscow paper that the books are considered “national treasures” that cannot leave Russia without a “special decision” exempting them from a decree signed by President Boris Yeltsin forbidding the export of such treasures.
The Lubavitchers, for their part, have no intention of stopping their fight for the books.
“I’m going to Vancouver for the summit to lobby Clinton and Yeltsin, and I can still be in Los Angeles for Pesach” said Cunin referring to the planned April 4 meeting in British Columbia between the U.S. and Russian presidents.
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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.
