CIP Supports Jewish Spiritual Movement Demand for Return of Russian-Held Library

by Stephen Schwartz
CIP
January 19, 2013

http://www.islamicpluralism.org/2179/cip-supports-jewish-spiritual-movement-demand-for

Postage stamp issued by the Republic of Bosnia-Hercegovina honoring the Sarajevo Haggadah, a medieval Jewish manuscript twice saved -- from the Germans in 1941 and from the Serbs in 1992 -- by Muslim caretakers at the National Museum of Bosnia-Hercegovina.

The Center for Islamic Pluralism (CIP) is a global network of moderate, conventional, traditional, and spiritual Muslim scholars, clerics, Sufi shaykhs and babas, authors, academics, journalists, intellectuals and activists. CIP currently maintains groups and correspondents in 30 Muslim-majority countries and Muslim-minority communities. CIP has long endorsed the demand by Chabad Lubavitch, a Jewish spiritual movement, for return to its rightful religious conservators of the "Schneerson collection," a theological archive held illegally by the Russian government

The "Schneerson collection" comprises at least 12,000 books and manuscripts collected by the early Chabad religious scholars, supplemented by more recent handwritten memorabilia. Parts of the library were seized by Communist authorities beginning in the 1920s.

Rabbi Yosef Yizchak Schneerson [1880-1950], the sixth rebbe of the Lubavitch Chasidim (a rebbe is comparable to a Sufi grandshaykh or dedebaba in Islam), was forced to flee both Communists and Nazis in Eastern Europe at the beginning of the second world war. He left behind the remnants of the collection that had not previously been confiscated by Moscow.

The "Schneerson collection" is currently held by the Russian State Library and the Russian Military Archives. On January 16, U.S. District Court Judge Royce Lamberth ruled that the Russian authorities must pay $50,000 to the Chabad Lubavitch representatives in New York for each day the collection is not returned. Russian officials have opposed this decision angrily and arrogantly.

The Russian government contends that the "Schneerson collection" is state property and cannot be removed from its territory. But "official" excuses for the theft and continued usurpation of the Jewish archive by the Russians, following similar crimes by the German Nazis, are constructed wholly on falsehoods.

It is absurd to imagine that an archive of metaphysical writings can have a "military-historical" value for Russia. It is immoral for the Russian state, as it did in the Communist era, to overrule the right of a religious body to dispose of its documentary endowment. The "Schneerson collection" was expropriated as a form of antireligious terror. The Russian military historians should leave the Chabad adherents alone and the Russian administration should remove itself from consideration of the esoteric principles of the Jewish mystical movement.

Damage from an arson attack on the Harabati Baba teqe, a Sufi Muslim religious complex in Tetova, Macedonia, 2010 – Photograph by the Bektashi Community of the Republic of Macedonia.

CIP considers the complaint of the Chabad Lubavitch movement in this affair to be of considerable significance to Muslims, especially to Sufis. Like the Russian government, the Saudi Arabian and other Islamic regimes preempt the rights of religious scholars and qualified experts to protect the legacy of religious works. Muslim fundamentalists have devastated shrines, schools, mosques, and libraries from Mali to Macedonia and on to Pakistan. Like their past disciples, the Serbian radicals, the Russians treat libraries as objects for manipulation and, one fears, destruction. The contempt shown by the Russians for the feelings of the Jewish believers in the case of the "Schneerson collection" is a microcosm of the attitudes employed by Serbian terrorists. Serb aggressors deliberately targeted and burned the national, academic, and specialist libraries in Sarajevo during the Bosnian war of 1992-95, and the Sufi libraries in Kosova during the liberation struggle of 1998-99. At the hands of atheistic and hostile political powers, neither the Jewish nor the Muslim cultural patrimony is secure, unless we act for its rescue, rehabilitation, and restitution. In the Albanian context, with which we are also concerned, the same may be said for Catholic cultural monuments and records.

Unfortunately, the U.S. presidential administration of Barack Obama attempted to discourage the Jewish petitioners in the "Schneerson collection" campaign from appealing for return of their rightful property. The spurious reasoning of the federal authorities had been that the assertion of religious rights on American soil will interfere with U.S.-Russian relations. But Judge Lamberth found "unconvincing" the argument by the U.S. government "that sanctions would 'risk damage to significant foreign policy interests.' " U.S.-Russian cooperation cannot be founded on acceptance of injustice and lawlessness.

CIP repudiates the Obama posture on the "Schneerson collection," while actively demanding that Russia comply with international standards of cultural preservation and hand over the archive at once to Chabad Lubavitch representatives. CIP and our colleagues throughout the Muslim ummah have made clear that if the Saudi kingdom insists on vandalizing the Islamic architectural assets of Mecca and Medina, it will be the object of Muslim protests. Similarly, if Russia persists in its refusal to return the "Schneerson collection," its rulers should be subjected to institutional boycott by Jews, Muslims, Christians, and others concerned for respect to universal history and culture.

Related Topics:  Albanian Muslims, Balkan Muslims, Bosnian Muslims, Kosovo, Macedonia, Muslim-Jewish Relations, Pakistan, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Wahhabism receive the latest by email: subscribe to the free center for islamic pluralism mailing list