Twelve Hasidic worshippers were arrested Monday after breaking into the Chabad-Lubavitch world headquarters in Crown Heights, New York, and allegedly damaging the synagogue beneath it, The Guardian reports.
Chaos reigned at Chabad-Lubavitch’s world headquarters in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights neighbourhood of New York on Tuesday as Jewish leaders and police confronted what Rabbi Motti Seligson, a Chabad spokesman, called “a group of extremist students”.
The building was once home to the leader of the Orthodox Jewish movement, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, and attracts thousands of visitors each year. Schneerson led Chabad-Lubavitch for more than four decades until his death in 1994, reviving a Hasidic religious community devastated by the Holocaust.
Seligson said rioting students from within the movement “secretly breached the walls of a vacant building behind the headquarters, creating an underground passage beneath a series of office buildings and lecture halls that eventually connected to the synagogue.”
A construction crew was called in Monday to repair the damaged walls, but the students who created the tunnel met it with protests. Seligson said:
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 reason for the tunnel has not yet been announced. A New York Police Department (NYPD) spokesperson said officers were called to the building Monday afternoon to respond to a disorderly group that was disturbing public order and damaging a wall.
The individuals allegedly responsible for the tunnel were arrested for criminal trespassing and trespassing, as well as obstructing governmental agencies, according to an NYPD spokesperson.
City inspectors were called to the scene to conduct an emergency structural inspection. During the inspection, police officers stood behind barricades around the headquarters, blocking a line of young people who wanted to enter the building. The NYPD said the building is now closed pending a structural safety inspection by city inspectors.
