A riot between the New York Police and a local Hasidic group ensued after the discovery of an illegal tunnel dug inside a historic synagogue at 770 Eastern Parkway in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. This Monday, authorities came to the site to fill the tunnel inside the synagogue with cement.
Three weeks ago, neighbors reported a series of strange noises inside the building. At sight, the tunnel was discovered, and the synagogue leadership allegedly ordered its destruction. According to reports, the tunnel was made six months ago.
The synagogue of one of the city’s most prominent Hasidic groups is currently divided into two different factions that have been fighting for almost three decades over leadership. One of the factions was against the destruction of the tunnel, sparking a brawl in an attempt to save it.
Footage from the police at the site shows a group of men breaking a wall in the prayer space of the synagogue that leads to the tunnel. Besides the confrontation with the police, the videos also show these men sitting inside the tunnel while others are taking wooden benches and panels of walls to block the entrance to the tunnel. Eventually, one of the officers uses a spray to disperse the group.
Once the riot was stopped, the police arrested 10 people. The Department of Buildings declared that inspectors were still on site to investigate the integrity of the building and possible structural damage made by the digging of the illegal tunnels. But why was that tunnel built for, and who made it?
The 770 Synagogue Tunnels
The 770 Synagogue in Brooklyn is the headquarters of the world’s Chabad-Lubavitcher movement, an orthodox Hasidic group with roots in 19th-century Russia. Today, it’s one of the largest Hasidic groups in the world to connect the Jewish population to their identity and faith.
However, as mentioned, since 1994, the group has been divided in two. In that year Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, best known as the rebbe, passed, leaving uncertainty on the leadership of the group since no successor was ever named.
The mainstream faction of the Lubavitcher group wants to carry out the teachings and vision of the Rebbe. However, a more radical faction believes that he was more than a mere leader, but the Messiah himself, and someone who never died. So, this has caused several legal disputes about the function and the role of the 770 synagogue. Enter the tunnel.
According to the investigation, the tunnel unites the headquarters of the Chabad-Lubavitcher to an adjacent property that was a women’s mikvah (purification bath). The tunnel aims to expand the synagogue as the rebbe once wished. As you can imagine, it was the smaller faction the one that allegedly carried out the digging of the tunnel without the authorization of the mainstream faction, nor the city authorities.
Rabbi Motti Seligson, a spokesman of the mainstream group, claims the tunnel was made by a “group of extremist students” who want to respect the rebbe’s intentions. “This is, obviously, deeply distressing to the Lubavitch movement, and the Jewish community worldwide,” Motti claimed in a written statement.
Conspiracy Theories Around the 770 Synagogue’s Tunnels
As imagined, as soon as the videos from the riot were posted on social media, a series of antisemitic posts and conspiracy theories started to appear. One of the first rumors that sparked was that authorities found children-sized mattresses with blood stains inside the tunnels and a baby chair. However, as confirmed later, the images belonged to footage of one of Gaza’s hospital bombings last December.
But the theories go way deeper. Some even started to connect the tunnels to Jeffrey Epstein and a net of trafficking (hence the mattresses) to the point that it was taken as far as to say that Epstein’s crimes and the tunnels were part of rituals to produce adrenochrome.
Naturally, all these have been refuted, and authorities and the Chabad-Lubavitcher group itself have claimed that this was just a matter of expansion of the synagogue that was poorly done by a small group. The real matter here is that they never requested permits to dig, endangering the structure of the synagogue (which has been closed since) and the adjacent buildings.
