Secret tunnels, a brawl with police and the fanatical Hasidic Jews devoted to their ‘Messiah’: Incredible story behind the viral videos that shocked the world as ‘extremist’ zealots staged their own Shawshank Redemption in reverse

It started with diggers who were so desperate to avoid detection that they smuggled out the soil and rubble in their pockets, just like in the Hollywood movie The Shawshank Redemption. Only this wasn’t a prison break, but a synagogue hack.

It ended this week when members of a Hasidic Jewish community in New York were arrested and charged over a secret 60-foot tunnel connecting to a historic synagogue. It came as extraordinary scenes of the group’s skirmish with New York police at the synagogue went viral online.

Leaders of the synagogue, headquarters of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, only discovered the tunnel in recent weeks — reportedly after neighbors complained of hearing people speaking Yiddish under their floors. On Monday, they called in a cement truck to fill the hole.

However, they were forced to call the police after dozens of pro-tunnel protesters arrived, attempting to stop workers from entering the tunnel.

Stunned officers arrived to find a group of young Hasidic Jews, their black suits and hats dusty from the excavations, using crowbars and their hands to break through the wall of the main prayer room that hid the entrance to the tunnels, before entering ran to stop. they are filled in.

As some of their sympathizers began angrily stomping around the benches in the synagogue, police discovered four of the tunnellers hiding in a hole behind the wall, reading from sacred texts and refusing to come out.

Rabbi Menachem Mendel, whom some young fanatics believe is the Messiah

Chabad officials described the tunnel builders – reportedly yeshiva, or religious school students – as “extremists” and the excavations as “odious.”

Nine of them, ages 19 to 21, were arrested for criminal mischief and reckless endangerment.

New York is home to the largest Hasidic population outside of Israel, and the historic synagogue at 770 Eastern Parkway – known to members of this deeply insular and intensely observant community as “770” – is one of the most important religious sites in the city.

It was once the base of Chabad Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, one of the most influential Jewish leaders of the 20th century. The rabbi, who fled Nazi Germany, spent 40 years until his death in 1994 building a global network of schools and community centers, revitalizing a Hasidic community devastated by the Holocaust.

In fact, he is so revered that some of his followers – including the tunnel diggers – believe him to be the Messiah. Although Chabad leaders do not share their views, these fanatics insist that the rabbi never died, despite the fact that he is now said to be 122 years old.

For years, many of the rabbi’s followers were eager to fulfill his promise to expand the synagogue in Crown Heights and address overcrowding problems, and were frustrated by opposition from their elders.

Then, insiders say, a small group of young and “messianic” rabbinical students from a holy city in Israel came to study in the synagogue and took matters into their own hands — quite literally, considering that the tunnel they started to build was carved out. At night with hand tools such as picks and shovels. How they thought building a tunnel would expand the synagogue remains to be explained.

Chabad-Lubavitch International Headquarters at 770 Eastern Parkway in Crown Heights, New York

Yesterday, members of the Hasidic community revealed how the six original tunnel builders started building tunnels

The rebels gained access for the first time to an abandoned mikvah for Jewish men, or ritual bath, around the corner from the synagogue. Creepy video footage taken by a local resident revealed the beginning of the cramped and rough-hewn tunnel.

Residents say they were allowed into the mikvah building six months ago to investigate a “terrible rat infestation,” which in retrospect may have been caused by the tunnel construction that began months, and possibly even a year, ago.

Footage showed soil piled high in the main room of the baths, which is designed for the Jewish purification ritual, as well as discarded clothing and even a stained mattress.

Yesterday, members of the Hasidic community revealed how the six original tunnel builders, most of them in their teens and early twenties, started building tunnels.

‘Have you seen The Shawshank Redemption? That’s what these young men did in the first place,” Eitan Kalmowitz told the New York Post. “They dug and put the dirt in their pockets.”

They quickly realized that the task was beyond them and organized a collection so that they could hire migrant workers – described as Mexicans – to do the work properly, install support beams and live and sleep on site for at least three weeks so that their presence would not be disturbed. detected.

After gaining access to the abandoned mikvah building, workers broke through a 20-by-20-foot metal fence in the bathroom wall and began tunneling under a shrine reserved for women next to the synagogue.

They then excavated a basement-level space, described by synagogue staff as a “long, 8-foot-wide room,” beneath a decade-old synagogue extension on the ground floor.

City officials say the illegal tunnel was so poorly reinforced that the stability of the buildings above it has been compromised.

The bizarre episode, along with accompanying video footage, sparked rabid anti-Semitic conspiracy theories on satanic, ritual sex abuse’.

“If there are two things modern conspiracy theories are obsessed with, they’re the Jewish people and secret tunnels,” conspiracy theory expert Mike Rothschild told Rolling Stone. “So it’s clear that Jewish people digging secret tunnels will set off alarms in people’s minds – even if the purpose of the tunnels turns out to be completely nonsensical.”

A Chabad spokesperson said: “This episode has been very painful for us and the entire Jewish community. The synagogue has profound significance for the Chabad-Lubavitch movement and the Jewish people worldwide.”

He said they looked forward to the restoration of the “sanctity of the synagogue.”

The irony of young Israeli men digging a tunnel in New York on a religious impulse while their compatriots risk their lives in very similar tunnels to fight Hamas in Gaza is not lost on some observers.

“The picture of Israelis coming to Brooklyn to build illegal tunnels looks terrible,” said Allan Nadler, a retired rabbi and academic at Drew University in New Jersey.

“These Israeli army guys should be in the army to demolish the Hamas tunnels. It all looks a bit crazy.’ Crazy, but as the saying goes: it could only happen in New York.