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Culture
August 15, 2011
The Met nixes Russian art loan over Chabad archive
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Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo by Arad
New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art reportedly has canceled plans for an art loan to a Russian museum in the ongoing dispute over a Chasidic archive.
The Metropolitan Museum had planned to lend 35 items by fashion designer Paul Poiret to the Kremlin Museum in Moscow for a September show. A number of loans between the two museums have been affected by the dispute over the archive of religious books and documents, which a U.S. District Court in Brooklyn has ruled belongs to the Chabad movement.
Russian officials have warned their country’s museums that artworks traveling to the United States could be seized to force the release of the archive.
“It is going to be the policy of the museum that there has to be some equity for lending to be resumed,” Met spokesman Harold Holzer told Art Info.
The archive of 12,000 books and 50,000 other documents assembled by Rabbi Joseph Isaac Schneersohn was seized during the Russian Revolution and the Nazi invasion, and then later by the Russian army.
The Russian Cultural Ministry in contesting the ruling in the U.S. court claims that Schneerson had no heirs when he left Russia.
“One American organization made a completely illegitimate claim on this collection of books,” Russian Culture Minister Alexander Avdeyev told the Straits Times in January. “We have our own believers who respect these books no less.”
A version of this article appeared in print.Post your comment below!
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The Russians have been lying about this all along. Only when all legal orders of their courts in Russia were ignored by the Russians did Chabad resort to US Federal Court under the Sovereign Immunities Act. The Russians appeared in court by Counsel, and only when the US court ruled against them at an early stage did they pick up their marbles and sulkily walk away. Thus Chabad won a default judgement, but not because the Russians didn’t appear in US court at the early stages of the case.
- Comment by David Sternlight on 8/18/11 at 5:21 am
I have visited that country many times at the invitation of their Academy of Sciences, and have followed the Chabad case over many years. the Russian Courts agreed that the collection was never nationalized under Soviet law; the Russians are simply lying about this, rearguing a position they already lost in the Russian court system.
There’s a lot more perfidy, lying, and illegal (under their own law) behavior by the Russians, while Chabad continually acted in good faith; some day this story will likely be the subject of a book.
This writer speaks only for himself and not for Chabad.
- Comment by David Sternlight on 8/18/11 at 5:22 am
In typical Russian fashion, this collection had lain moldering and ignored, in a basement of the Russian library. It was only when American Chabad Rabbis discovered that the Russians had been lying in denying they had the books, did the books suddenly become a “priceless part of the Russian patrimony” and once scholars inventoried them and proved their existence did they suddenly become Russian national treasures..
- Comment by David Sternlight on 8/18/11 at 5:31 am
The books had been left in Moscow for safe-keeping when the Chabad Rebbe had to flee the country, after being threatened with death. He took what he could with him. Later, when he fled from Eastern Europe to America ahead of the Nazi invasion, he left what he had with the US embassy for safekeeping. The Nazis overran the Embassy, stole the books, and the Red Army then captured them and sent them to Moscow. They were never “spoils of war”: but rather stolen holocaust property belonging to the Rebbe who had emigrated to America. And it was the Rebbe’s position that they were the property of Chabad World HQ in Brooklyn, NY.
- Comment by David Sternlight on 8/18/11 at 5:38 am
The story of the Rebbe’s escape from the Nazis has itself been the subject of a book. He actually was smuggled out by German officers under the noses of the Gestapo by way of Berlin. It is a truly miraculous account, facilitated by his American supporters.
- Comment by David Sternlight on 8/18/11 at 5:46 am
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Chabad first sued in Russian court. It won at every level all the way up to the Supreme Judicial Court. At the same time, several Heads of the Russian Government promised two US Presidents and a US Vice President that they would return the books to Chabad, but failed to do so. Meanwhile, when Chabad came to the Russian State Library to collect the books as the Russian Court had ordered., the Librarian fomented an anti-Semitic riot and thugs attacked the Chabad Rabbis. It was only then that the Duma intervened and the Russian Supreme Commercial Court ruling was nullified.