Kremlin, Rabbis Battling Over Hebrew Texts : Culture: Even Secretary of State Baker and Prime Minister Major have asked for the return of the Lubavitch books.

A dispute over Hebrew texts, with notes scribbled in the margins by five generations of rabbis in a tiny Byelorussian town, has become a test of wills between the Chabad Lubavitch movement and Soviet bureaucrats.

Four rabbis from the United States and Israel say they will stay in Moscow until they are given more than 12,000 books that belonged to chief Lubavitch Rabbi Sholom Ber Schneerson. Soviet officials seized the books when private property was nationalized after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, and they are now part of the Lenin Library.

The Soviet Ministry of Culture sees the controversy in such dramatic terms as to suggest that returning the books would deny everything the revolution stood for and could even bring down Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev and all his reforms.

“Gorbachev could give back the books, but he might loose his head because of it,” said Artur P. Tolstyakov, chief of libraries for the Ministry of Culture. “Today, it’s the Schneerson library, tomorrow it will be all other confiscated libraries, and then all of the riches that were confiscated after the revolution. Then how long do you think Gorbachev will be in his job?”

The dispute has grown so acute that both Secretary of State James A. Baker III and British Prime Minister John Major requested that the books be returned during recent meetings with Gorbachev. More than half of the members of the U.S. Senate and many influential people in the Soviet Union and abroad have written letters calling for the release of the volumes.

Schneerson led the Lubavitch movement during World War I, when the German army was heading east toward his home in Lubavitch. Fearing that the Germans would confiscate his books, he sent more than 12,000 volumes from his collection to Moscow for safekeeping in a storage facility.

A couple of years later, the Bolsheviks confiscated them.

“This is not just a battle for 12,000 books,” said Rabbi Boruch Schlomo Cunin of Los Angeles, director of Chabad Lubavitch on the West Coast. “It’s a battle between good and evil. The forces of good are the sparks in the books and the forces of evil have been at work here for decades.”

Cunin and three other rabbis came to Moscow last November. In five months, they have succeeded in pestering dozens of Soviet bureaucrats but not in freeing the volumes.

The rabbis say the books are not worth a lot of money but are very valuable to them because they have comments and marginal notes written by five generations of leaders of the Lubavitch movement, which was based in the Byelorussian town of Lubavitch until the late 1920s and since then in New York.

“These are not unusual texts, but what makes them important is that our leader’s ancestors studied by them,” Cunin said. “This is the spiritual core of our library.”

But the Soviets are equally fervent about keeping the books.

Nikolai N. Gubenko, the Soviet minister of culture, wrote the four rabbis late last year, saying the books had been “nationalized,” had become state property and were “a priceless historical document.” The best the Lubavitch Jews could hope for would be copies, he said.

“If someone decides to give back the Schneerson library, then it will become a precedent and we will have to give back all the books that were confiscated. That would be the destruction of the Lenin Library,” Tolstyakov said in an interview. “If the controversy was only about the Schneerson library, then we could make a decision easily, but it’s a much more serious problem,” he said. “It’s as if the British went to America and started demanding what belonged to them before the American Revolution.”

Tolstyakov said the rabbis fail to understand the Soviet side of the argument. “They don’t understand that they’ve come to another country with its own laws.”

He added that a commission of Soviet lawyers, Hebrew scholars and representatives from the Lenin Library is expected to report on its investigation of the Schneerson library early in May. “They could decide that this case is an exception and the rabbis can have their books,” he said. “But I don’t know what the outcome will be.”

If the books are released, it would end a 70-year battle. When Rabbi Schneerson died before he could retrieve the books, his son, Yosef, who also headed the Lubavitch sect, tried several times to reclaim them. But the new Bolshevik government was confiscating books, estates, art and almost all valuable property from citizens, Tolstyakov said, and the Schneerson collection was moved to the Lenin Library near the Kremlin.

Schneerson was imprisoned and sentenced to death under dictator Josef Stalin, but his life was spared and he went into exile. Retrieving the books while Stalin was in control seemed hopeless. Attempts were resumed during the U.S.-Soviet detente of the 1970s by Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson, son-in-law of Rabbi Yosef Schneerson, the current Lubavitch leader.

“Rabbi Schneerson ordered us to come here,” said Rabbi Yosef Y. Aharonov, executive director of the Chabad Lubavitch in Israel, “and we will not leave this country without his books.”