NEW YORK. Not just Gaza. Thousands of kilometers away from the Palestinian enclave, theater of the war between Israel and Hamas which has lasted for over three months, separated by a sea and an ocean, there is a neighborhood of New York called Crown Heights and located in the central portion of Brooklyn which was the scene of clashes for a day between members of the Orthodox Jewish community and law enforcement. The reason? An underground tunnel, just like Gaza, which the members of the Hasidic enclave had built illegally. The scenes of the escape from the tunnel and the clashes with the police went viral and literally flooded the internet and social media yesterday.
The protagonists of Monday's “suburban battle,” mostly men in their teens or early twenties, were filmed demolishing wood panels and support beams inside the world headquarters of Chabad-Lubavitch in Crown Heights, a movement Hebrew spread internationally and a branch of Hasidic Judaism, in turn based on the spiritual renewal of Orthodox Judaism. Rioters tried to stop police and workers from filling a secret tunnel illegally dug to reach a closed women's bathroom. Other footage from the temple on Eastern Parkway shows police trying to hold back dozens of men who forced their way into the twenty-foot-wide enclosure beneath the women's section, overturning wooden pews in their anger. The synagogue's leader, Rabbi Yosef Braun, condemned those involved, saying they had come “ready to destroy and deface the Holy Walls” and calling what happened “stunning”.
Members of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement had been digging the tunnel for nearly a year, apparently designed to reach an abandoned women's mikvah, a ritual bath used for the purpose of immersion to achieve purity. The aim was to forcefully “expand” the synagogue, according to the Jewish newspaper Forward, although it is not clear why they decided to opt for the “underground” solution. However, the secret plan was not successful and the tunnel was discovered last month – reports Israel National News – when some citizens who lived in homes next to the synagogue reported suspicious noises coming from underneath their homes.
Once the plan came to light, the synagogue management called in engineers to assess the damage, and concrete mixers arrived on Monday to fill the tunnel. This was enough to unleash the anger of the Hasidic youth. The emulators of Gaza attacked the brick walls of the synagogue, hammers in hand. Some even managed to make their way into the makeshift tunnel, captured in a video that showed a man brazenly drinking from a can in the tunnel as police tried to keep his associates at bay as they attempted to make their way underground. According to the Forward, some of the rioters were also seen taunting the cops and filming their attempts to enter the tunnel. The officers also detained several people outside the synagogue. The guerrilla war lasted several hours, with a coming and going of agents carrying handcuffed “rebels” out of the tunnel. According to the New York Post, at least a dozen men were taken into custody, one was charged with obstruction of government administration, another received a summons for misconduct, while a dozen were charged with criminal offenses minors. The point is to understand whether the Crown Heights tunnel is the only tunnel or whether it was actually designed to connect to a larger and more branched maze. Just like in Gaza.
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