Shared Playbook    

For over three decades, Chabad has been locked in a faceoff with the Russian government over possession of a massive and priceless seforim collection that had been the private possession of the Chabad rebbes before the two world wars, while Moscow declares that the collection of thousands of rare published volumes and manuscripts, currently held in Russia’s national Lenin Library, is part of Russia’s cultural heritage. Lubavitcher activists, under instruction of the Lubavitcher Rebbe zy”a, want to see the collection reunited with the world-famous Chabad archive maintained at the chassidus’s headquarters in Crown Heights.

For years, the US had opposed Chabad’s efforts to seize Russian assets as a bargaining chip in that quest, but now America is going after the very same funds.

The legal saga began in 2004, when Chabad-Lubavitch filed a lawsuit in US federal court to demand that Russia return the texts. Putin’s government vigorously contested the case, arguing that a US court had no jurisdiction over a foreign nation. The dispute lingered for five years, when US District Judge Royce Lamberth issued a final ruling holding the Russians in contempt of court and awarded Chabad $50,000 a day for every day that Russia did not return the books. By now, that comes to over $165 million.

Subsequent court orders have authorized Chabad to claim certain Russian assets in the amount of the fine, but claiming those assets requires finding them first. That’s because so much of Russian wealth is tied up in private companies.