Dispute with US group over Jewish holy texts leads Russia to freeze cultural loans to US

A decades-long dispute between Russia and an Orthodox Jewish group over ownership of holy texts collected for centuries by influential rabbis and seized by the Soviet Union has threatening cultural loans between the two countries.

Russia has already frozen art loans to major American institutions, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Houston Museum of Natural Science, fearing that its cultural property could be seized after the Brooklyn, New York-based Chabad-Lubavitch movement won a lawsuit in U.S. District Court in 2010 compelling the return of its texts.

The Met — and possibly other major lending institutions — are weighing whether to discontinue loans of cultural property to Russia.

The issue has become so important to relations between the U.S. and Russia that the Justice Department has signalled for the first time in court papers filed in April that it may weigh in on the legal case — which the Russians pulled out of in 2009, citing sovereign immunity. On Monday, the DOJ requested additional time to review the case. Federal attorneys declined to comment for this story, and Russia's Culture Ministry did not respond to numerous calls, emails and faxes from The Associated Press seeking comment.

The U.S. State Department has worked to support Chabad's campaign to reclaim its sacred texts since the 1990s. Chabad is a worldwide Orthodox Hasidic Jewish movement, and has spent decades trying to reclaim the trove of thousands of religious books, manuscripts and handwritten documents, known as the Schneerson Collection, held in Russian repositories. Collected since 1772 by the leaders of the movement, the revered religious papers include Chabad's core teachings and traditions.

Russian officials have argued that Chabad has no ownership rights over the collection and that the case belongs in Russian courts because it considers the works part of the country's cultural heritage.