Arrests at Chabad’s iconic headquarters after students thwart attempt to fill secret tunnel
https://forward.com/fast-forward/575528/arrests-at-chabad-770-secret-tunnel/
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.
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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.
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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.
Thanks. No known motivation, according to the article. Very strange.