Judge scolds Hasidic students in bizarre scheme to build tunnel under NYC synagogue: ‘Blemish on the Chabad movement’

 

A Brooklyn judge on Monday berated a rebellious crew of Hasidic Jewish students charged with digging a secret tunnel under a prominent Crown Heights synagogue — even as four defiantly demanded a trial.

“If these young gentlemen, if these kids think they’re exercising power over this court, they are sadly mistaken,” Brooklyn Supreme Court Justice Adam Perlmutter said in court. “You’re a shame to your family. You’re a shame to the worldwide Chabad movement.”

Two of the accused students had their cases adjourned and will have the charges dismissed if they refrain from any more digging underneath the Chabad-Lubavitch world headquarters at 770 Eastern Parkway and stay out of trouble for the next six months.

All but four Hasidic Jewish students charged with digging a tunnel under a Brooklyn synagogue took plea deals. The rest are going to trial.Michael Nagle

Most of the others pleaded guilty to reduced criminal mischief charges and agreed to refrain from any “destructive activity” at the temple for the next three years, while paying $200 in restitution.

But the others — Yisroel Binyamin, Yerachmiel Blumenfeld, Menachem Maidanchik and Yaakov Rothchild — refused to take the deals and are now due to stand trial and could face prison time.

At a court hearing in October, Rothchild told The Post that a three-year ban from the temple — as prosecutors were offering as a condition of a plea deal at the time — was unacceptable.

“Being banned from 770 for three years is worse than jail,” he said.

The bizarre case came to light in January 2024, when news broke of the tunnel underneath the synagogue, the holiest of temples for the worldwide Chabad movement.

When cops showed up they found the students trying to hide out inside the underground hideout — and got into a scuffle with the police when they tried to get them out.

The students claimed they were seeking to expand the sanctuary, as Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the Chabad “Rebbe,” called for before his death in 1994.

“The goal of everything was to expand 770 a year-plus ago,” student Mendel Gerlitzky, one of the suspects who was lectured by the judge, said Monday. “We weren’t successful.

“We were hoping to expand or at least draw attention to the cause,” Gerlitzky said. “The judge was saying, if the rabbi wanted the Chabad expanded he would have gotten the money, whatever. There was fundraising money, there were permits and everything.

 “But there were a couple of people, for their own selfish purposes, that don’t want the synagogue to expand and are stopping it because they have some power in the legal system,” he said.

He said those people don’t represent the Chabad movement.

However, the judge wasn’t buying it.

“It is not becoming of followers of Jewish faith in a synagogue,” Perlmutter said in court. “If you want to expand 770, they know how to do it. They built buildings all over the world. They know it involved raising money, getting building permits, adjusting the zoning laws as necessary.

 “You are a blemish on the Chabad movement as far as I am concerned.”

Meanwhile, the plea deals offered by prosecutors on Monday forbade the students from continuing to dig under the temple and an adjoining space reserved for women. The deals do not bar them from the building.

However, if the students who took the plea deals violate the terms, they will be banned from setting foot at the synagogue for five years, the judge warned.