Temple Tunnel Turmoil

Tha fuck??

https://twitter.com/rawsalerts.../1744536722078044399

I'm at a loss for words.

I have questions

quote:

Originally posted by MikeinNC:
I have questions

Click the “show more” link

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Originally posted by cheeze:

quote:

Originally posted by MikeinNC:
I have questions

Click the “show more” link

Which tells you nothing?

So they had secret tunnels? Why were the police trying to fill them with concrete?
What were the individuals charged with and why?

Lots more where those questions came from?

quote:

The underground tunnels, secretly built by a group, including members of the Jewish community, about 6 months ago in an attempt to expand the iconic synagogue,...

Do they really know why, or are they just writing bullshit. How does one expand the synagogue by digging underground tunnels?

Panic room? Given the recent climate, I could see a synagogue wanting to put some in, which do not appear on plans.

I find it odd that this is not on the front page of foxnews that I can find.

I find it odd that one would think they could build such a structure without a building permit (ie Rules for thee not for me)

I have heard 3 reasons, covid, expand the synagogue and shelter from attack

None of these pass the sniff test.

This article says it's a dispute between two factions over the building.

https://forward.com/fast-forwa...d-770-secret-tunnel/

quote:

Arrests at Chabad’s iconic headquarters after students thwart attempt to fill secret tunnel

The tunnel’s purpose is unclear, as is the reason some Lubavitchers defied attempts to plug it

By Louis Keene, January 8, 2024

It took months, perhaps years for a small crew of Lubavitchers to dig a secret passageway underneath the famed headquarters of the Chabad movement. They would not let it be filled so easily.

The New York Police Department was called Monday to 770 Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights neighborhood, where a number of Chabad students — most in their teens and early 20s — mounted a last stand against construction crews called to fill in the tunnel connecting the synagogue at that location to the defunct Chabad mikvah around the corner.


In videos circulating on Chabad community news sources and social media, Lubavitchers can be seen ripping down the wood paneling on the south wall of the synagogue, revealing a cavernous concrete space about 20 feet wide underneath the women’s section. Several young men were sitting or standing in the space — apparently to prevent it from being filled — as scores of others watched or recorded video on their phones.

NYPD eventually made 10 arrests, according to community news outlet CrownHeights.info. Video showed several men in Hasidic garb being led out, their wrists bound with zip ties.

The images of destruction inside a sacred space at the center of Chabad spiritual life were painful for many Lubavitchers, who rushed to condemn it.

“Whose hand did not shake and tremble when they touched those walls — when they took a hammer to those walls?” Rabbi Yosef Braun, one of the heads of the Crown Heights Beis Din, said Monday in an audio recording posted to CrownHeights.Info. He added: “It is as painful as can be.”


Locked in litigation
The chaos at 770 — the former home of the late Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn, the sixth Lubavitcher rebbe — was the culmination of a controversy that began when the tunnel was discovered in early December, and the latest chapter in a multi-year battle between the Chabad-Lubavitch movement and synagogue leadership for control of the iconic building.

Chabad-Lubavitcher movement spokesperson Rabbi Motti Seligson said in a statement posted to X that the actions of “extremists” had forced the temporary closure of the building pending a structural safety review.

“This is, obviously, deeply distressing to the Lubavitch movement, and the Jewish community worldwide,” Seligson wrote. “We hope and pray to be able to expeditiously restore the sanctity and decorum of this holy place.”


It was unclear what motivated the creation of the tunnel and why some students reacted so strongly to the arrival of a cement truck Monday morning to fill it. Reports said the people behind the tunnel’s excavation — it was unconfirmed who or how many people that was, but sources tended to agree they began within the last year or two — had hoped to expand 770, but it was not obvious how the tunnel accomplished that.

A video posted on the CrownHeights.info Instagram in December showed a dark, dirt-walled crawl space allegedly beginning in the recesses of a now-closed women’s mikvah nearby. Large dirt mounds obstruct much of the basement.


After the tunnel’s discovery, the leadership of Beis Chayeinu — the Chabad synagogue that meets in 770 — hired structural engineers to determine the extent of the damage and the safety issue it posed, and eventually moved to fill it.

According to Haredi news source Collive.com, the students who tried to stop the filling of the tunnel were mostly from Israel and associated with Chabad Messianism — whose adherents believe that Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the seventh Lubavitcher Rebbe, was the Messiah. The Chabad-Lubavitch movement publicly disavows those beliefs.

But the movement, despite holding the title to the property at 784-788 Eastern Parkway, does not control the sanctuary that spans the space below it. It has been locked in litigation with Beis Chayeinu over control of that space for decades.

“Lubavitch officials have attempted to gain proper control of the premises through the New York State court system,” Seligson wrote on X. “Unfortunately, despite consistently prevailing in court, the process has dragged on for years.”

Rabbi Yehuda Krinsky, Chabad-Lubavitch chairman, issued a statement Tuesday thanking the NYPD for their assistance.


Beis Chayeinu could not be reached for comment.

In Pueblo, there are several tunnels. One that I know about runs under a street and connects a church to a parsonage. There are several in the downtown area. Look for old flagstone sidewalks and chances are there are tunnels below. The old speakeasies of prohibition. And a couple around an old meat packing plant.

The Post says the tunnel goes to the women's ritual bath? Something out of Porkys? (non kosher example)

https://nypost.com/2024/01/09/...-brooklyn-synagogue/


"The videographer then crawls through the hole, which leads to a 3-foot-high dirt tunnel that reportedly extends about 50 feet and around two corners to the headquarters’ location of its shuttered women’s ritual bath."

The Daily Mail article I read indicated that the tunnel went to a women's facility. It also said it was discovered after neighbors heard "strange noises". Daily Mail also had pictures of beer bottles and discarded clothing in the tunnels. Doesn't take a huge leap of the imagination to put together what the "young men" were using the tunnel for, and why they were upset when the Rabbis tried to close it up !

similar to story posted by skull leader

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/ne...brooklyn-chabad.html

Young followers of a Jewish Hassidic group in Brooklyn took it upon themselves to expand their synagogue, sparking conspiracy theories once their secret operation was shut down by their own leaders, congregants claimed.

News of a tunnel discovered in New York City on Monday and the arrest of young men trying to stop its destruction unleashed countless theories about what the tunnels were for, but members of the Chabad group claimed in Tuesday that the true story is not what most assumed.

Followers of the late Rabbi Menachem Mendel 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 - on 770 Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn Heights.

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.

That's when synagogue leaders themselves called the NYPD, which caused the viral images as the young men tried to defend the expansion.

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.

The rabbi, he himself said that it has to be extended. Now there's ifs and things that pull back from being expansion, the different politics and different things that are holding it back from being expanded. But all the disciples of the rabbi, they want it to be expanded. It just the question is, how? When will it happen?

'Everyone knows that eventually the expansion is going to go this way, all the way down to Union.'

Indeed, its public knowledge that Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson issued the expansion doctrine, and online videos show what the hopes are for the expansion, but on Tuesday Chabad leaders would not acknowledge any ambitions of expanding the sanctuary and accused the young men of being extremists and vandals.

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.'

A dozen young men, all students at Chabad, were arrested on Monday but released shortly after. Three were given summons and six were criminally charged with mischief and reckless endangerment, according to the NYPD.

A congregant who did not agree with the boys' actions told the Daily News that their faith does believe in expanding the sanctuary, but not the way it was being done.

'[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,' Berel Bendet.

You're all wrong.

This is a Rabbi hole you don't want to go down

quote:

Originally posted by goose5:
In Pueblo, there are several tunnels. One that I know about runs under a street and connects a church to a parsonage. There are several in the downtown area. Look for old flagstone sidewalks and chances are there are tunnels below. The old speakeasies of prohibition. And a couple around an old meat packing plant.

Butte, MT has/had tons of tunnels leading from businesses uptown to the local cathouses. That way, the fellas could take a break for a quickie and nobody was the wiser. That was back when that sort of thing was legal (and even after it wasn't). I used to know the owner of the last remaining brothel in MT (in Butte) called the Dumas. He was turning it into a museum and gave us a tour of the basement rooms and tunnel entrances one day. It was pretty cool.

The Dumas Brothel

quote:

Originally posted by SigSentry:
This is a Rabbi hole you don't want to go down

That would be this article talking about Rabbi Nuchem Rosenberg.

"In New York, and in the prominent Orthodox communities of Israel and London, allegations of child molestation and rape have been rampant. The alleged abusers are schoolteachers, rabbis, fathers, uncles—figures of male authority."