No Russian art exhibits will be shown in the United States until the settling of a dispute around a library that a U.S. court ordered the Russian government to return to a Hasidic group, Culture Minister Alexander Avdeyev said Thursday.
Rabbi Joseph Isaac Schneersohn’s library of 12,000 historical books and manuscripts was nationalized in Soviet times. The Chabad-Lubavitch group sued to have it returned, with a Washington judge granting the appeal in August and the Russian government calling the ruling a breach of international law.
The Culture Ministry will not authorize any exhibitions of state-owned Russian art in the United States until it has a “100 percent” guarantee that the artwork will not be seized by court marshals to secure the return of Schneersohn’s library, Avdeyev told Ekho Moskvy.
(MT)