During a Monday meeting between Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, the Prime Minister requested that Russia return the historic Guenzberg collection of ancient Jewish manuscripts.
Russian officials said they will "positively consider" it.
It is the second largest anthology of ancient Hebrew literature, collected by a Jewish family beginning in the 1940s. It includes 14,000 books, 45 incunabula (books published at the dawn of printing in the 1300s, over 2,000 Hebrew manuscripts other documents.
Though Zionists purchased the collection in 1917, the outbreak of World War I delayed shipment of the collection, which was then seized in the Bolsehvik Revolution.