U.S. Senate Asks Yeltsin to Return Sacred Hebrew Texts

All 100 members of the Senate have signed a letter asking Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin to return a collection of 12,000 sacred Hebrew texts to the U.S.-based Chabad Lubavitch movement, a spokesman for the group said Friday.

“This lets Yeltsin know that he can’t ignore this issue,” said an elated Rabbi Boruch Shlomo Cunin of Los Angeles, the West Coast director of the Orthodox Jewish sect.

The texts, with tiny handwritten notes written by five generations of rabbis in the Belarussian town of Lubavitch, are at the center of a diplomatic controversy that has raged for more than a year.

The books, now in the Russian State Library, were moved from Lubavitch to Moscow for safekeeping during World War I and were confiscated by the Bolsheviks in 1918, after the Russian Revolution.

Cunin and three other rabbis went to Moscow in 1990 to ask the reformist government of Mikhail S. Gorbachev to give the books back, but the Soviet bureaucracy refused.

So the Lubavitchers began trying other tactics, from a sit-in at the library to pleas from British Prime Minister John Major, Secretary of State James A. Baker III and, now, the entire U.S. Senate.

Yeltsin promised in February that he would try to get the books moved, but the Russian bureaucracy is still resisting, Cunin said.

Officials at the State Department said that they will raise the issue with Russian Foreign Minister Andrei V. Kozyrev when he arrives here Monday to prepare for Yeltsin’s state visit later this month.

“We hope Yeltsin will come with the books,” Cunin said. “It would prove his credibility. . . . It will prove that Russia has changed. Otherwise, we will have to ask, are their commitments worth anything?”