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Thirteen young Orthodox Jewish men were arraigned Wednesday and pleaded not guilty to charges connected to the bizarre January incident at a Brooklyn synagogue involving an illegally dug tunnel. The men – who are between the ages of 18 and 21 – pled not guilty to charges ranging from criminal mischief to obstructing governmental administration in State Supreme Court in Brooklyn Wednesday.
Four defendants are currently in Israel – where he said all but one of them come from – and were not present at the hearing, attorney Levi Huebner said, adding that ‘nobody’s trying to run away’ and they will return to face the charges. The young men have been ordered to give up their passports but did not agree to prosecutors’ demands to ban them from the Crown Heights synagogue in question. None of these young men have been charged with actually performing the excavation.
Six of the defendants face obstruction of a government administration and 11 are face felony criminal mischief charges, the New York Post reported. ‘Violence and destruction are anathema to everything the Rebbe taught. We pray that they see the error of their ways,’ Rabbi Motti Seligson, a spokesman for the Chabad-Lubavitch movement, told the New York Times. The men charged all belong to that movement.
Wild scenes broke out in early January at a synagogue in Brooklyn, after construction workers arrived to fill in an illegally dug tunnel that was being used by young Orthodox Jewish men in an attempt to link the building to a nearby ritual bath. The chaos erupted at the Chabad Lubavitch global headquarters in Crown Heights at 770 Eastern Parkway. In December, the rabbi discovered youths had dug tunnels beneath the building to access another property on the same street. It remains unclear why the young men are so attached to the property they were allegedly accessing illegally – they have for years been at loggerheads with the synagogue over who owns the main property, but the appeal of the ritual bath or mikvah is unclear.
When cement diggers and construction crews showed up last night to fill the tunnel, the young men protested, throwing themselves in the way to block their efforts. It took the NYPD to forcibly remove them. Videos of the incident were later shared on social media. Members of Chabad-Lubavitch have been digging tunnels under the synagogue for many months. Young members of a Hasidic group in Brooklyn secretly hired migrant workers to dig a tunnel under their Brooklyn headquarters when their elders refused to expand the sanctuary.
Six members of the Chabad-Lubavitch group first began digging on their own, using crude tools and their own hands, stuffing dirt into their pockets to hide the project from their synagogue’s leaders, according to the New York 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,’ Chabad-Lubavitch member Eitan Kalmowitz told the outlet. The young men then reportedly did a collection to pay migrants to finish the job they started, and the workers lived at the abandoned building next door while the project continued. Followers of the late Rabbi Schneerson, seen as the Messiah by many in the group, told DailyMail.com they believe redemption will come to them when they fulfill his command of expanding their holiest site – his former home at 770.
Frustrated by what they saw as the synagogue’s leadership unwillingness to work to fulfill the command, young Chabad members independently started tearing down walls to connect the synagogue, which sits in a basement and already covers two buildings, into a third building next door. The Chabad leaders are in litigation over control of the building, which is currently vacant but used to serve as a bath house over 30 years ago. But the unapproved project was discovered in December after neighbors reportedly complained, and the synagogue’s leaders themselves set out to shut it down. When workers showed up to fill the space, a few young Hassidic men refused to let them, with some seen on video breaking through a sanctuary wall with hammers.
An investigation by the city’s Department of Buildings uncovered a tunnel that was 60-foot-long, 8-foot-wide and 5-foot-high located underneath the global headquarters of the Chabad Lubavitch movement New York building officials have issued emergency work orders to stabilize a historic synagogue and its neighboring structures. A tourist guide at the Chabad headquarters who asked to be identified only as Baruch told DailyMail.com that most of the group’s member agree the synagogue must be expanded, but think the boys went about it ‘the wrong way.’ ‘Thousands of people come here every year. It’s impossible for everyone to fit, especially during the high Holidays – we’re talking about five, 10,000 people squishing into here. I’ve been here. It’s painful stuff. Just sweating. It’s very, very hard.
Zalmy Grossman, one of the Chabad members, agreed with Baruch, and even became upset when he witnessed Chabad media director Motti Seligson deny that the group is looking to expand 770 because, he explained, that is one of their fundamental beliefs. ‘There is a big hole on the ground that we can connect the two buildings together from both sides and it becomes a big giant place, the whole underground – to connect them together, to be bigger, bigger, bigger,’ Grossman said outside 770.
Seligson had previously issued a statement denouncing the young men, who he described as a minority in the synagogue. ‘Students broke through a few walls in adjacent properties to the synagogue to provide them unauthorized access,’ Seligson posted on X. ‘A cement truck was brought in to repair those walls. Those efforts were disrupted by the extremists who broke through the wall to the synagogue, vandalizing the sanctuary, in an effort to preserve their unauthorized access.’ The synagogue has been closed until inspectors determine its structural safety.
The building at 770 Eastern Parkway was once home to the movement’s leader, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, and draws thousands of visitors each year. Its Gothic Revival facade is immediately recognizable to adherents of the Chabad movement and replicas of the revered building have been constructed all over the world. Schneerson led the Chabad-Lubavitch for more than four decades before his death in 1994, reinvigorating a Hasidic religious community that had been devastated by the Holocaust. The headquarters were also the epicenter of the 1991 Crown Heights riots, which began after a seven-year-old boy was struck and killed by a car in the rabbi’s motorcade.
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