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World Jewish News
Israel Demands Russia Return Unique Collection of Baron Gintsburg
24.04.2009
As reported by the Maariv newspaper, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Israel has recently sent a formal request to the Head of Russian MFA Sergey Lavrov, to
return a unique collection of Jewish books and manuscripts, which used to belong to Baron David Gintsburg, to the Jewish National Library in Jerusalem.
This is a collection of Jewish books and manuscripts in Hebrew, Arabic, Farsi and other languages, gathered by four generations of the famous Jewish family Gintsburg. The collection of more than 14 thousand unique items, including books published in the XV century, was bought by wealthy Russian Jews from the heirs of Baron David Gintsburg in the beginning of 1917 for half a million gold rubles, and was meant to be transported to Jerusalem.
However, the October Revolution and the subsequent civil war prevented the removal of the collection, and in the early 1920s it was confiscated by the Bolsheviks and transferred to the Lenin Library (now the Russian State Library) in Moscow.
The transfer of the collection to its rightful owner - the Jewish National Library in Jerusalem - was the aim of such people as Albert Einstein, David Ben-Gurion, Chaim Weizmann.
Before the return of Sergiev Compound to Russia, the library director Shmuel Ar-Noy asked the Foreign Ministry to make the return of collection a condition for Compound's transmission. The Foreign Ministry answered that it was
impossible, but asked to prepare a legal certificate, which was handed over to Lavrov.
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