Agudas Chasidei Chabad

New York religious corporation founded in 1940 by the sixth Lubavitcher Rebbe, described by courts as the umbrella organisation of Chabad-Lubavitch; legal owner and trustee of the Chabad library at 770 Eastern Parkway and claimant in the Gourary and Schneerson library cases

Agudas Chasidei Chabad of United States
Type	Non-profit religious corporation (New York)
Founded	25 July 1940
Founder(s)	Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn
Headquarters	Brooklyn, New York
Services	Umbrella body of Chabad-Lubavitch; holds the Chabad library in trust
Key people	Rabbi Avraham Shemtov (chairman, as reported in 2013)
Remarks	Plaintiff in Agudas Chasidei Chabad v. Gourary (1985–1987) and Agudas Chasidei Chabad v. Russian Federation (2004–2026)

Agudas Chasidei Chabad of United States (Hebrew for "Union of Chabad Hasidim"; often shortened to Agudas Chabad) is a non-profit religious corporation registered in New York. It was incorporated on 25 July 1940, a few months after the sixth Lubavitcher Rebbe, Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn, arrived in the United States. US courts and legal commentators describe it as the umbrella organisation of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement. It is best known as the legal owner of the movement's central library at 770 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn, and as the party that brought two major lawsuits. The first, against the Rebbe's grandson Barry Gourary in 1985–87, established that the library was held in trust for the Chabad community. The second was the long US case against the Russian Federation over the Schneerson Collection in Moscow.

Founding and status

According to the US District Court for the District of Columbia, the sixth Rebbe arrived in the United States on 19 March 1940, and "On July 25, 1940, Agudas Chasidei Chabad was incorporated in New York". Bazyler and Gerber write that after arriving in New York, "the sixth rebbe established Agudas Chasidei Chabad of United States as a New York religious corporation, with headquarters in Brooklyn". They describe it as "the world-wide umbrella entity for the orthodox Jewish movement called Chabad-Lubavitch". The same court noted that "Long before Chabad was incorporated as a non-profit corporation under the laws of the State of New York, it was an organization of Jewish religious communities located worldwide, with origins in the Russian Empire". In the Russian case the defendants argued that, because the corporation dated only from 1940, it could not have owned the Archive taken in Poland in 1939.

In 2013 the Russian chief rabbi Berel Lazar referred to Rabbi Avraham Shemtov as chairman of Agudas Chasidei Chabad. Its relationship to the movement's other central bodies, such as Merkos L'Inyonei Chinuch, is not covered here.

The Gourary case (1985–1987)

On 5 August 1985 Agudas Chasidei Chabad sued Barry S. Gourary, a grandson of the sixth Rebbe, in the US District Court for the Eastern District of New York. It was a "diversity action for replevin, also alleging conversion and trespass", brought "to recover some 400 books or the proceeds of their sale". Gourary, joined by his mother Hanna Gourary (the sixth Rebbe's daughter), counterclaimed that those books and the rest of the library "housed at a building at 770 Eastern Parkway, in Brooklyn, New York, owned by the plaintiff" belonged to them by inheritance.

After a bench trial in December 1985, Judge Charles Sifton ruled on 6 January 1987. He found that "the library was never held by the Rebbe as personal property for his personal benefit and his private, as opposed to religious, purposes. It was held as personal property for the community's benefit and for charitable uses." He held that, on its arrival in the United States, the library "was delivered into the custody of Agudas Chabad with an express declaration that it was to be held by that corporation in trust for the benefit of the Chabad Chasidic community". The court dismissed the inheritance counterclaim and granted replevin. It ordered Barry Gourary to return the books, but stayed execution pending appeal.

Evidence and findings

The court divided the library into two parts. The first was the ksovim, manuscripts of the Rebbes "passed from Rebbe to Rebbe". The second was "over 40,000 texts, printed and handwritten, collected by or under the direction of" the sixth Rebbe from the 1920s. It accepted that both "were, undoubtedly, in their origins personal property of the Rebbe, albeit property used to serve the purposes of Chabad Chasidism". The question was whether he had later placed the library in a charitable trust. In testimony quoted by the court, Hanna Gourary said that the ksovim "are sacrosanct to the family" and that "Ksovim should remain with the family".

The court relied mainly on the sixth Rebbe's own statements during and after the Second World War, when he sought US government help to bring the library out of Poland. After leaving Warsaw in November 1939 he wrote to Rabbi Liberman, who quoted the letter to Agudas Chasidei Chabad in New York. In it he said he had "no space for the books which Agudas Chabad loaned me for study. I would be pleased if Agudas Chabad were to take these books back." The Second Circuit noted that "On three occasions between 1939 and 1946 Rabbi Schneersohn explicitly declared in writing that the library belonged to the plaintiff Agudas Chabad." The chief item was a letter of 25 February 1946 to Alexander Marx of the Jewish Theological Seminary, about the manuscripts and books that the Nazis had confiscated from his library at Otwock. Judge Charles Sifton called it "one extraordinary letter". In it the Rebbe wrote that the books "are the property of Agudas Chasidei Chabad of America and Canada". The defendants argued that the letter was a tactic. The judge replied that "it does not make much sense that a man of the character of the Sixth Rebbe would, in the circumstances, mean something different than what he says, that the library was to be delivered to plaintiff for the benefit of the community". The court also weighed contrary evidence: a notarised German letter of 31 January 1940 in which the Rebbe affirmed that "my Library ... is indeed my property".

The court also looked at how the family treated the library after the Rebbe's death in 1950. He left no will, and his estate "was closed without listing the library as an asset". His widow and both daughters, including Hanna Gourary, "signed releases reciting that they had received what they were entitled to under the estate without taking possession of the library". The court concluded: "The conclusion is inescapable that the library was not held by the Sixth Rebbe at his death as his personal property, but had been delivered to plaintiff to be held in trust for the benefit of the religious community of Chabad Chasidism." It did not accept every argument made for Agudas Chasidei Chabad. It rejected what it called "strained and implausible arguments made on plaintiff's behalf".

A Chabad-side account says that Rebbetzin Chaya Mushka Schneerson gave a deposition in which she said the books "belonged to the Chassidim because my father belonged to the Chassidim". According to the same account, the judge accepted the defence's objection to this testimony "on technical grounds". Neither judgment mentions it.

Appeal

The Second Circuit affirmed on 17 November 1987. It held that "the district court's finding of an unequivocal intent to create a charitable trust--far from being clearly erroneous--is in our view rightly decided". The opinion, by Judge Cardamone, records that in the summer of 1985 Barry Gourary "surreptitiously removed over 400 rare books from the library and sold some of them to book dealers in various parts of the world. He realized approximately $186,000 from the sale." It accepted that "some of the evidence is, standing alone, equivocal", but observed that "a person's actions sometimes speak even more plainly than his words". It also rejected the Gourarys' claim to a jury trial and held that Barry Gourary's jury demand was untimely. This was a civil ruling on property and trust law: judgment in replevin for Agudas Chasidei Chabad, with the defendants' declaratory-judgment counterclaim dismissed. There was no criminal case against Gourary. Chabad marks the date of the decision, 5 Tevet 5747, as the festival of Didan Natzach ("our side is victorious"). The finding that the library belonged to the community rather than the Rebbe's family was later relied on in the Russian litigation. In that case the District of Columbia court noted that "the Library was not before the court in Gourary, as the Sixth Rebbe had left it behind in Russia when he was allowed to leave Russia for Latvia".

The Schneerson library litigation (2004–2026)

Main article: Schneerson library case

On 9 November 2004 Agudas Chasidei Chabad sued the Russian Federation, its Ministry of Culture, the Russian State Library and the Russian State Military Archive. It sought the return of the "Library" (books seized after 1917) and the "Archive" (papers seized by the Nazis in Poland and taken by Soviet forces in 1945). The main rulings were as follows.

• 2006: the D.D.C. upheld jurisdiction over the Archive claims but not the Library claims.
• 2008: the D.C. Circuit held that both claims could proceed under the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act's expropriation exception. The Harvard Law Review note criticised this ruling for limiting the act of state doctrine "in a way that is inconsistent with the doctrine's constitutional underpinnings".
• 2009–2010: Russia withdrew from the case. On 30 July 2010 the court entered a default judgment ordering the defendants to surrender the collection.
• 2013: the court held the defendants in civil contempt and imposed sanctions of "$50,000 per day". It did so over the objections of the US government. Agudas Chasidei Chabad rejected Putin's transfer of part of the Library to Moscow's Jewish Museum. It said the move "does not satisfy Chabad's religious requirements or remedy Russia's unilateral seizure, retention, and claimed ownership of these sacred books".
• 2024: the D.C. Circuit held that the district court "does not have—and has never had—jurisdiction over Chabad's claims against the Russian Federation". The default and sanctions judgments were therefore void as against the Federation itself.
• 2026: the Supreme Court denied certiorari on 20 January 2026.

Legal status: the 2010 judgment for Agudas Chasidei Chabad was a default judgment, entered after Russia stopped taking part. It was not a ruling on contested evidence. The contempt sanctions were civil, not criminal. As against the Russian Federation itself, both were later held void for lack of jurisdiction.

Editor's note: Seth M. Gerber's affiliation in the 2010 article is Bingham McCutchen, and his role, if any, in the Chabad litigation has not been verified. Agudas Chasidei Chabad's governance, officers other than the reported chairman, finances and its disputes over the 770 Eastern Parkway building have not been researched for this page.

See also

• Schneerson library case
• Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn
• Menachem Mendel Schneerson
• Merkos L'Inyonei Chinuch
• Berel Lazar and the Kremlin
• Public menorahs