vosizneias.com

Escalating the legal dispute between Russia and the United States over the Lubavich library, prosecutors in Moscow sought an arrest warrant for Rabbi Shalom Dov-Ber Levin.

The request for an international arrest warrant against Rabbi Levine, the director, and curator at the Central Chabad-Lubavitch Research Library was reported on Wednesday by the news site MK. He is wanted for “failing to return cultural property” to Russia.

According to the report, the move is connected to seven manuscripts from the Rebbes library, a historic collection of 12,000 books and 50,000 documents named for the Fridker Rebbe.

Russia’s state archive is holding the collection inside the Jewish Museum of Moscow. In 2013, a U.S. judge ordered Russia to pay $50,000 a day in fines for failing to honor a 2010 ruling by the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., to hand over to the New York-based movement the entire library.

But Russia insists the library is part of its national heritage. In 2014, a Russian court demanded that the U.S. Library of Congress hand back seven precious Jewish texts to Moscow – and, in a tit-for-tat ruling, said it should pay a massive fine for every day it delays.

The request for an arrest warrant is over those seven books, which Chabad loaned in 1991 to the Library of Congress, MK reported.

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