It’s a bizarre story coming out of New York City: the secret Jewish tunnels that got busted up by police. It was a chaotic scene, where officers were forced to deploy pepper spray to get the crowd of Hasidic Jews under control. Almost a dozen members were arrested. The video footage is nuts, featuring a bloody mattress and an intricate network of underground works that immediately led to city inspectors verifying and combing the area for signs of degradation in structural integrity. The tunnels were built underneath a synagogue in Crown Heights.
Police in New York storm a Jewish synagogue in Brooklyn and discover a secret passage leading to a tunnel under the city
— Breaking news 24/7 (@aliifil1) January 9, 2024
A mattress with traces of blood on it pic.twitter.com/ZwC8B4Q39O
Hasidic Jew seen crawling out of sewer after NYPD busts Chabad tunnel network under New York City. pic.twitter.com/Kb6ogYrEb2
— Breaking news 24/7 (@aliifil1) January 9, 2024
More footage of the underground tunnels discovered under Synagogues in New York City. pic.twitter.com/RRnfUGs2WQ
— Breaking news 24/7 (@aliifil1) January 9, 2024
This illegal project was supposedly the brainchild of a group of extremist students of the Chabad movement. Whatever the case, their main aim was to expand the “holy site.” To do so, they hired illegal aliens to construct the Shawshank-like tunnels that eventually caught the attention of police (via NY Post):
Extremist students from an ultra-Orthodox Hasidic group secretly hired migrant laborers to help them build a controversial tunnel at the sect’s world headquarters in Crown Heights — all to fulfill what they felt was a religious obligation to expand the holy site, The Post has learned.
Six renegade members of the Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidic movement secretly began digging the 3-foot-high, 20-foot-wide, 50-foot-long tunnel themselves, using crude instruments and their hands. They stuffed the dirt into their pockets so that their work wouldn’t be detected by the sect’s leaders and wider community, a source in the Orthodox community told The Post.
“You’ve seen the movie ‘The Shawshank Redemption’? That’s what these young men did at first: They dug and put the dirt in their pockets,” said Eitan Kalmowitz, a member of the Lubavitcher community in Crown Heights.
Later, the men, most of them in their teens and early 20s, took up a collection and hired a group of migrant laborers to finish the job, Kalmowitz said, describing the workers as “Mexicans.”
The NY Post added quotes from unidentified members and rabbis of the Chabad movement, many of whom denounced the secret project, calling the culprits extreme. Some of the perpetrators were here on student visas, which will soon be revoked.
“They are fanatical…They are part of a small extreme group. The concept of Chabad is to be kind to everyone, and we are kind to them, but we never thought for a second they would make such problems,” said a rabbi to the NY Post who wished to remain anonymous. “It’s a big mistake to let them into the community. The school will now close the visas to them.”
Well, that’s the least they can do. This story is all-around nuts. And these kids who did this are cuckoo.