Secret tunnels, a brawl with police and the fanatical Hasidic Jews devoted to their 'Messiah': Incredible story behind the viral videos that shocked the world as 'extremist' zealots staged their own Shawshank Redemption in reverse

It started with diggers so desperate to avoid detection that they smuggled out the soil and rubble in their pockets, just like in Hollywood film The Shawshank Redemption. Only this was no prison break-out, but a synagogue break-in.

It ended this week with members of a New York Hasidic Jewish community arrested and charged over a 60ft secret tunnel that connected to a historic synagogue. It came as extraordinary scenes went viral online of the group skirmishing with New York police in the synagogue.

The leaders of the synagogue, which are the headquarters of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, only discovered the tunnel in recent weeks - reportedly after neighbours complained of hearing people speaking Yiddish under their floors. They called in a cement lorry on Monday to fill in the hole.

Hasidic Jewish students watch on as police guard a breached wall in the synagogue on January 8

However, they were forced to call police after scores of pro-tunnel protesters arrived, attempting to stop the workmen accessing the tunnel.

Bemused officers arrived to find a group of young Hasidic Jews, their black suits and hats dusty from the excavations, using crowbars and their hands to break through the wall of the main prayer chamber which hid the entrance to the tunnels, before running in to stop them being filled in.

As some of their sympathisers started thrashing around synagogue benches in anger, police discovered four of the tunnellers hiding inside a hole behind the wall, reading from holy texts and refusing to come out.

Rabbi Menachem Mendel, who some young zealots believe is the Messiah 

Chabad officials described the tunnellers - reportedly yeshiva, or religious school students - as ‘extremists’ and the excavations as ‘odious’.

Nine of them, aged 19 to 21, have been arrested for criminal mischief and reckless endangerment.

New York is home to the biggest Hasidic population outside Israel and the historic synagogue at 770 Eastern Parkway - known to members of this deeply insular and intensely observant community as ‘770’ - is one of the most important religious sites in the city.

It was once the base of Chabad rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, one of the most influential Jewish leaders of the 20th Century. The rabbi, who had fled Nazi Germany, spent four decades until his death in 1994 establishing a global network of schools and community centres, revitalising a Hasidic community devastated by the Holocaust.

He is so revered, in fact, that some of his followers - including the tunnellers - believe he is the Messiah. Although Chabad leaders don’t share their view, these zealots insist that the rabbi never died, despite the fact he would now be 122 years old.

For years, many of the rabbi’s followers have been anxious to honour his vow to expand the Crown Heights synagogue and address its overcrowding issues, and were frustrated by opposition from their elders.

Then, say insiders, a small group of young and ‘messianic’ rabbinical students from a holy city in Israel came to study at the synagogue and took matters into their own hands - quite literally, given that the tunnel they started to build was carved out at nighttime using handheld tools such as picks and shovels. How they thought  building a tunnel would expand the synagogue has yet to be explained.

The Chabad-Lubavitch World Headquarters at 770 Eastern Parkway in Crown Heights in New York

Yesterday, members of the Hasidic community revealed how the six original tunnellers began their tunnel-building operation

The rebels first gained entry into an abandoned Jewish men’s mikvah, or ritual bath, around the corner from the synagogue. Eerie video footage shot by a local resident revealed the start of the cramped and roughly-hewn tunnel.

Residents say they were allowed into the mikvah building six months ago to investigate a ‘terrible infestation of rats’ which, in hindsight, may well have been caused by the tunnelling that started months, and possibly even a year, ago.

Footage revealed soil was piled high in the main room of the baths, which is designed for the Jewish rite of purification, as well as discarded clothes and even a stained mattress.

Yesterday, members of the Hasidic community revealed how the six original tunnellers, most of them in their teens and early 20s, began their tunnel-building operation.

‘You’ve seen The Shawshank Redemption? That’s what these young men did at first,’ Eitan Kalmowitz told the New York Post. ‘They dug and put the dirt in their pockets.’

They soon realised the task was beyond them and organised a collection so they could hire immigrant labourers - described as Mexicans - to do the job properly, installing support beams and living and sleeping on site for at least three weeks so their presence wouldn’t be detected.

Having gained access to the abandoned mikvah building, the workers broke through a 2ft-by-2ft metal gate in the bathroom’s wall and started tunnelling under a sanctuary area, reserved for women, next door to the synagogue.

They then dug out a basement-level space, described by synagogue staff as a ‘long, 8ft-wide room’, under a ground floor, decade-old extension to the synagogue.

City officials say the illegal tunnel was so poorly reinforced that it has compromised the stability of the buildings above it.

The outlandish episode, together with the accompanying video footage, sparked rabid anti-Semitic conspiracy theories on X, formerly Twitter, as users tried to make a connection between what they said was a blood-stained mattress in a picture of the tunnel interior and claims of Jewish ‘satanic ritualistic sex abuse’.

‘If there are two things that modern conspiracy theories obsess over, it’s Jewish people and secret tunnels,’ conspiracy theory expert Mike Rothschild told Rolling Stone. ‘So obviously, Jewish people digging secret tunnels is going to set off alarms for people - even if the purpose of the tunnels turns out to be completely anodyne.’

A Chabad spokesman said: ‘This episode has been deeply painful for us and the entire Jewish community. The synagogue carries profound significance to the Chabad-Lubavitch movement and the Jewish people worldwide.’ 

 He said they looked forward to the ‘sanctity of the synagogue being restored’.

The irony of young Israeli men digging a tunnel in New York on a religious whim, when their compatriots are risking their lives in very similar tunnels to fight Hamas in Gaza, hasn’t been lost on some observers.

‘The image of Israelis coming to Brooklyn to build illegal tunnels looks terrible,’ said Allan Nadler, a retired rabbi and academic at Drew University in New Jersey.

‘These Israeli army-aged boys should be in the army demolishing Hamas tunnels. It all looks a little crazy.’ Crazy but, as the saying goes, it could only happen in New York.