Secret tunnel in NYC synagogue leads to brawl between police and worshippers

NEW YORK — A dozen students at Brooklyn’s Chabad Lubavitch World Headquarters were arrested as they tried to stop efforts to block a secret illegal tunnel they had dug in a bizarre attempt to expand the house of worship, officials said Tuesday.

Police were called to the famed Orthodox headquarters on Eastern Parkway near Kingston Avenue in Crown Heights around 6 p.m. Monday when several Orthodox students began breaking through a cement sanctuary wall with hammers.

Earlier in the day, Chabad administrators ordered the tunnel the students were trying to link to a basement study hall be sealed.

Students were attempting to build a tunnel from the synagogue to a corner vacant building owned by the Chabad on Kingston Avenue, about 55 feet away.

Video posted on Crown Heights Info shows a broken brick wall inside the abandoned building leading to a small tunnel. The hole is surrounded by loose bricks and disturbed dirt.

The students entered the vacant building and used jack hammers to break through the basement wall. They then broke through three intervening buildings that the Chabad used as offices before boring into the basement sanctuary, a Chabad official said.

Video of the mayhem in the sanctuary shows students throwing over benches and police officers trying to push people back from the mouth of the tunnel, which at some points was covered with a sheet.

Additional videos show students pulling wooden paneling from the wall and using hammers to break the cement blocks.

Chabad member Berel Bendet said that scores of students were studying in the sanctuary when a small group started to break through the wall.

“A lot of the students were studying at the time and were disturbed,” said Bendet, 30. “There are over 1,000 students in the school, so it is a small minority that unfortunately got some attention.”

Motti Seligson, a spokesman for Chabad headquarters, said students had started building the tunnel “some months ago.”

But their attempts to dig the tunnel made the building, which was built in the 1930s, unstable, forcing administrators to seal the tunnel, officials said.

Outraged that the tunnel was being sealed up, students tried to finish the tunnel and block the cement installers from filling in the entrance, leading to the police being called.

“Students broke through a few walls in adjacent properties to the synagogue to provide them unauthorized access,” Seligson tweeted. “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 students who built the tunnel were attempting to fulfill a demand by Lubavitch Rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneerson, who had called for the expansion of the house of worship back in 1972. Many Chabad members revere Schneerson as a messiah.

“(Rabbi Schneerson) did express a desire when he was alive that that synagogue, which was running out of space, should undergo an expansion — but a legal and proper expansion through the leadership of Chabad,” Bendet said. “There’s a possibility they misinterpreted that to mean a call to action on their part to take up the shovel, if you will.”

“It started with one guy,” said Brown, 27. “Once the paneling is off (his friends are) like, ‘Oh, let’s expand.’

“If you have a lot of time on your hands, you’re not doing drugs, you’re not messing with girls,” he added. “You go snooping around and all of a sudden a bunch of guys are like, ‘Lets do something.’”