Brooklyn tunnel scandal: police destroy a suspected crime scene

NEW York police have filled in a secret tunnel linked to a Chabad-Lubavitch Jewish community building with cement. This comes less than a fortnight after the tunnel was discovered after neighbours heard unusual sounds under their floors. The concreting job was requested by the synagogue leadership.

https://truthsocial.com/@the17thletter/posts/111741829240104536

According to the New York Post a group of “young renegades” from the Chabad-Lubavitch movement attempted to stop the cement flowing, sparking a brawl in the synagogue. They had apparently dug the 60-metre tunnel during the pandemic .

“Young renegades from the Chabad-Lubavitch movement wielding very elementary tools began religiously digging the tunnel under the sect’s world headquarters in Crown Heights on the Eastern Parkway during the pandemic because higher-ups were dragging their feet on expanding the synagogue’s sanctuary, sources said,” the Post reported.

But Alex Jones and multiple other non-mainstream outlets were speculating that the tunnel and its contents, which included heavily stained mattresses and children’s equipment, was looking more like some sort of child trafficking operation. Jones said after analyzing the video footage released by police “it doesn’t look too good”.

“Who’s going to go in there and do a forensic examination?” he asked. “Everybody’s acting like ‘oh the New York police are in there to end this, whatever it is, but instead they’re dumping concrete down there and sealing it. I want an investigation of what’s going on in those subterranean tunnels.”

Jones said he’d been told 28 years ago by FBI investigator Ted Gundersen that private schools in LA had subterranean tunnels through which they were transferring children to be molested. Photographs of these tunnels were posted online but appear to have disappeared.

The story being spun around the tunnel by the Post was bizarre. “The idea was to force the (synagogue) establishment into growing the space by essentially starting the effort for it — beginning with the roughly 3-foot-high, 20-foot-wide, 50-foot-long tunnel,” sources told the Post.

The report continued: “The crowd keeps getting larger,’’ a source somewhat sympathetic to the rebels’ cause told The Post on Tuesday. “It’s packed on Shabbos, and during the High Holidays, it’s unbearable.” The rebels, described as in their teens and early 20s, first gained entry into an abandoned Jewish men’s mikvah, or ritual  bath, around the corner on Union Street.

Digging a tunnel sounds like a rather strange way to increase space in a building. “They then broke through a roughly 2-by-2-foot metal gate in the former bath’s basement wall and tunneled their way under a sanctuary space reserved for women next-door to the synagogue… Then they breached the synagogue’s massive sanctuary.”

The report would have us believe the “renegades” were digging for about a year out of a private mikvah (ritual bath room) with shovels and pickaxes and sledgehammers, and the other members of the synagogue were blissfully unaware of it all.

But photos and video footage showed a professionally concreted path along one section and running beside what appears to be a brick basement wall. “Some time ago, a group of extremist students, broke through a few walls in adjacent properties to the synagogue at 784-788 Eastern Parkway, to provide them unauthorized access,” Rabbi Motti Seligson, spokesman for Chabad-Lubavitch, said in an e-mailed statement to The Post.

He said the tunnels were apparently designed to reach an abandoned women’s mikvah — or ritual bath — around the corner and “expand” the synagogue. But another report said the tunnel went under the women’s mikvah.

Another statement from the headquarters added that “the group of young agitators” were primarily in the US on student visas. “These individuals have been squatting in the synagogue and attempted to take control by demolishing walls to connect the basement to the adjacent building, intending to ‘expand’ the sanctuary,” it said. “Steps are being taken to revoke their student visas and repatriate them to their countries of origin.”

And to muddy the waters even further, the Post reported there were “ongoing disputes between the Chabad-Lubavitch movement and synagogue leadership over who legally owns the property. “The busted young men were charged with a variety of offenses including criminal mischief, attempted hate crime, attempted criminal mischief and reckless endangerment, cops said. All of the suspects live in Brooklyn.”

The Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith came out with predictable and inflammatory comments that “social media posts (about the tunnel) echo the blood libel, an unfounded claim originating in the Middle Ages that Jewish people used the blood of non-Jews for rituals.”