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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   4079 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for January 7, 2024

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What's with the synagogue tunnels?

Twitter thread that explains, with no sources, the context.

https://twitter.com/kilovh/status/1744884820780397015

This is the Small-Scale Questions Thread, so I'm going to take that as an excuse to not cite anything. Half of this is probably half made up, and I'm begging for corrections from people who know ( @2rafa ?). My qualifications are that I grew up a Reform Jew and had a Bar Mitzvah, so most of what I know about actual religious Judaism I learned from antisemites on the internet.

Within Judaism, Orthodox Judaism is the branch that rejected The Enlightenment in the 1800s, and still tried to continue as though that hadn't happened.

Within Orthodox Judaism, Haredi Judaism took that even further, and tried to be even more traditional than tradition. They aggressively isolated themselves from the rest of the population.

Within Haredi Judaism, Hasidic Judaism was like an ecstatic tent revival movement, that spun off a bunch of even more insular schools with increasingly bizarre and obscure beliefs and practices.

Within Hasidic Judaism, Chabad was one of those schools, with some or other crazy idiosyncratic beliefs of their own, but most importantly with the naturally-selective advantage of being evangelical: unlike virtually all other forms of Judaism, they aggressively proselytize and seek converts (though only from among other jews; especially less- or lapsed religious ones).

The last leader of Chabad, Menachem Schneerson ("The Rebbe"), died in 1994, without a successor.

The Chabad World Headquarters is 770 Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn, which was Schneerson's synagogue.

Within Chabad, Messianists (Mishichists) believe that Schneerson was The Messiah. Some think he is still alive. Some think that his synagogue, in Brooklyn, New York, is the Third Temple.

Many of these Messianists cohabitate, together with a majority of Chabadniks who are not Messianists, in this 770 Eastern Parkway synagogue, in I gather a sort of borderline anarchic situation since there was no leadership succession for the movement, and I don't think anybody even legally owns the building.

Upstairs in the building, there are the headquarters of multiple worldwide Chabad organizations, coordinating hundreds of satellite offices and synagogues around the world with memberships in the hundreds of thousands and budgets in the billions. In the basement, there is a wild ecstatic 24h religious free-for-all, with hundreds of bearded men in suits and hats packed in on top of each-other, chanting and dancing and debating... but probably just mostly reading quietly most of the time.

Within the Messianists, there is a faction, apparently mostly very young guys, apparently mostly recent immigrants from Israel (where apparently Messianism is stronger), who believe that Schneerson wanted to expand the synagogue, and meant that physically, and it was not getting done. So they took matters into their own hands and started digging.

The main cavity was just on the other side of a wall from the main basement room, presumably intended to expand the room. The tunnel was presumably to remove the dirt from the cavity to another room.

Some adults from upstairs who are relatively closer to being "in charge" finally called a cement company to come fill it back in. The digging faction started rioting. The police were called. That's when the videos are from.

The synagogue is now closed pending structural inspection.

Seems they wanted easy access to an historically important ritual bath that belonged to a different building

Also led to this truly hilarious tweet: https://twitter.com/RichardStrocher/status/1744599741265256803

The tunnels at the Chabad-Lubavitch World Headquarters were discovered in December 2023 by a construction worker.[4] The tunnels reportedly connected the building to a nearby closed men's mikvah.[3] In response, the synagogue’s leaders closed the women's section of the synagogue, where the tunnel connected to the building, until they could find a way to close off the tunnel.

Tunnel from men's baths to the women's section of the synagogue? 🥵

I think that is by far the funniest thing in the whole story.

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