The Schneerson Library goes online but stays in Russia

PROGRESS OF A SORT: Look, but don’t touch: Moscow’s Schneerson Collection goes online. Russian government continues to hold the Chabad dynasty’s seized collection of ancient books, but is opening it to public viewing on the web (Juile Masis, Times of Israel).

MOSCOW — In 1922, a few years before he fled the Soviet Union, the sixth Chabad-Lubavitch Rebbe Yosef Yitzchak Schneerson petitioned the Russian government to return 35 crates of books they had seized years earlier.

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The Soviet government did not return the books, and for almost a century they remained on the shelves of the Lenin public library in Moscow. But this month the Russian State Library will finish scanning and putting online the more than 4,500 books in the Schneerson Collection, making them accessible to everyone in the world at the click of a mouse.

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I have been following the dispute over these books and papers of the Lubavitcher Rebbes for some years. Background here and links.

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