A Brooklyn judge on Monday ruled against a gang of rebellious Hasidic Jewish students accused of digging a secret tunnel beneath the famous Crown Heights synagogue, even as four people came forward and demanded a trial. Regardless, he condemned it.
“If these young gentlemen and these children think they are wielding power over this court, they are sadly mistaken,” Brooklyn Supreme Court Justice Adam Perlmutter said in court. ” he said. “You are a disgrace to your family. You are a disgrace to the global Chabad movement.”
Two of the accused students have had their cases postponed and ordered to refrain from any further excavation beneath the Chabad-Lubavitch World Headquarters at 770 Eastern Parkway and stay out of trouble for the next six months. , the charges will be dropped.
Most of the others pleaded guilty to reduced charges of criminal mischief and agreed to refrain from “vandalism” at the temple for the next three years while paying $200 in restitution.
However, the others, Yisroel Binyamin, Yerachmiel Blumenfeld, Menachem Majdanczyk and Yaakov Rothschild, refused the deal and are currently scheduled to go on trial and could face prison terms.
At a court hearing in October, Rothschild told the Post that he did not accept the three-year ban from the temple that prosecutors had offered at the time as a condition of his plea agreement.
“Being banned from 770 for three years is worse than prison,” he said.
The bizarre incident came to light in January 2024, when news broke of a tunnel beneath the synagogue, the holiest temple for the global Chabad movement.
When the police arrived, they found the students hiding in an underground hideout, and when they tried to take them out, they got into a scuffle with the police.
The students claimed they were seeking an expansion of sanctuary, as Chabad's Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schnierson, called before his death in 1994.
“The whole goal was to expand the 770 more than a year ago,” student Mendel Gerlitsky, one of the suspects who was lectured by the judge, said Monday. “We were not successful.
“We wanted to amplify this cause or at least bring attention to it,” Gerlitsky said. “The judge said that if the rabbis wanted to expand Chabad, they would have gotten the money in any way possible. There were donations, there were permits, there were all kinds of things.
“But there are some people who don't want synagogues to grow for their own selfish purposes, and they have some legal power to stop it.” he said.
He said these people do not represent the Chabad movement.
However, the judge did not accept that.
“It's not about being a member of Judaism in a synagogue,” Perlmutter told the court. “If they want to expand the 770, they know how to do it. They’ve built buildings all over the world. I know that.
“As far as I'm concerned, you are a stain on the Chabad movement.”
Meanwhile, a plea deal offered by prosecutors on Monday prohibits the students from continuing to dig under the temple and the adjacent women's space. The agreement does not prohibit them from entering the building.
However, the judge warned that if the students who took the plea deal violate the terms, they will be banned from setting foot in a synagogue for five years.
