‘A little naive’: Details emerge about students arrested in tunnel fracas at Chabad world headquarters
A small crowd gathers outside Chabad Lubavitch headquarters on Eastern Parkway in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, the day after an illegally excavated tunnel was declared unsafe by the city. Photo by Mira Fox
By Beth Harpaz January 12, 2024
The lawyer for five young men charged in connection with a disturbance at Chabad Lubavitcher headquarters says his clients are young Israeli rabbinical students who may be naive, but are not violent.
A near-riot broke out Monday when a construction crew arrived to fill in an illegally excavated tunnel located near Chabad’s iconic building at 770 Eastern Parkway in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn.
Yeshiva students in a basement synagogue at 770 began ripping down panels and breaking open a wall in what Chabad spokesperson Motti Seligson described as acts of “destruction and vandalism.”
The city Buildings Department issued emergency work orders to stabilize nearby buildings rendered unsafe by what the agency called a “linear tunnel,” 8 feet wide, 60 feet long and 5 feet high. Seligson and the city agency said work was underway to remediate the situation.
The defendants
Five of the people arrested Monday were arraigned in Brooklyn on charges including criminal mischief, reckless endangerment and obstructing governmental administration. They pleaded not guilty and were released, without having to post bail, pending a March 14 court appearance. Another seven individuals were given summonses for lesser charges.
“They’re like students in colleges all over the country: a little enthusiastic, a little naive,” attorney Levi Huebner, who is representing the five young men, said in a phone interview. “They have beautiful ideas of the world and it doesn’t exactly comport with reality. We have students in colleges all over America supporting Houthis and saying to murder Jews and nobody is arresting them. These boys were not doing anything violent.”
The five who were arraigned were identified in court documents as Henachem Mulakando, 19, Shmuel Malka, 19, Yerachmiel Blumenfeld, 20, Dov Bear Shenhav, 20, and Levi Ytzhak Lahav, 20.
Huebner, 63, lives in Crown Heights and said he is a member of the Lubavitcher community.
Huebner downplayed the seriousness of the charges and said the defendants are all Israelis studying to be rabbis who live in dormitories near Chabad headquarters at 770 Eastern Parkway. Two of the men have dual U.S.-Israeli citizenship and none are married.
“They’re first offenders with no priors in their life,” Huebner said. “They had nothing to do with the quote-unquote tunnel, nothing to do with the excavation.”
He said they were accused of removing wall panels and holding onto others who were interacting with police during the fracas that erupted Monday. He did not know what type of visas the three who are not U.S. citizens hold, but said they could not be deported while they had a court case pending.
Who controls 770?
Monday’s brouhaha is rooted in a dispute that has been festering for decades between officials who run the Chabad establishment and a group that occupies the synagogue at Lubavitcher headquarters. The two entities have been fighting in court for years over who controls the building.
Among the fraught issues is the physical expansion of the basement synagogue where the ruckus occurred Monday. Fervent supporters of Chabad’s late leader, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, known as “the Rebbe,” want the synagogue expanded. They believe that by undertaking that excavation, they are fulfilling his vision.
“There was an adjacent abandoned building and it seems like somebody thought it was time to make an expansion to 770, which the Rebbe wanted to do since 1986,” Huebner said.
“It’s like divorced parents fighting over a house and the kids thought they could do self-action and make the synagogue bigger,” Huebner added. “Was it the right way to go about it? No.” He added that the individuals he represents were not charged in connection with the “tunnel activity.”
Seligson, Chabad’s official spokesman, tweeted that the excavation was carried out “by young agitators underneath a ground-level extension made by the synagogue decades ago.” He said concrete had already been poured to shore up the damage in coordination with the city Department of Buildings.
Attorney is a controversial figure
Huebner said he was retained to represent the young men by “people who volunteered to help with legal expenses.”
Huebner is not beloved by all in the community, judging from online posts criticizing him and a series of complicated lawsuits in which he’s been accused of fraud and theft by former clients and filing “frivolous motions in bad faith,” as one judge put it.
“Those bad things are straight-out lies,” Huebner said. If he’d done them, he added, “I wouldn’t be an attorney. I’d be in jail.”
The New York State Bar Association referred a query from the Forward about Huebner to the state court system, which did not respond to an email Friday.
Huebner says he graduated from Brooklyn Law School in 1996 and was admitted to the bar in 2006. Contrary to an online claim from his critics alleging that he took the bar 37 times, he said, “I took the bar one time,” noting that the bar is only offered twice a year anyway.
What the city Buildings Department says
City Buildings Department spokesperson Ryan J. Degan said the city had not issued any vacate orders to Chabad headquarters at 770 Eastern Parkway, and he noted that the tunnel is not connected to 770. It is instead located underneath a single-story extension behind two four-story buildings at 784 and 786 Eastern Parkway, which are next door to 770.
The agency said the tunnel had inadequate shoring in place and that wall openings had been created in the basements of adjacent buildings. The department also said the buildings’ owners had already started remediation efforts and had hired a team that included an architect, engineer and contractor to carry out the work.
Partial vacate orders were issued to two structures near 770 and a full vacate order was issued to a nearby two-story building at 302 Kingston Ave., the city said.
Some reports have claimed that the tunnel was dug not by students but by unlicensed migrant workers. “Regardless of who performed the work, it is the responsibility of the property owner to ensure that their buildings are safe and code compliant,” Degan said.
Conspiracy theories
Meanwhile, baseless conspiracy theories from antisemites and other extremists have run rampant on social media claiming that the tunnels were being used for child sex rings. The Department of Buildings noted that “the tunnel was found to be empty other than dirt, tools, and debris from workers.”
Seligson tweeted that “the antisemitic conspiracy mill is in overdrive.”
The Rebbe, who died in 1994, worked at 770 for decades. His father-in-law, Chabad’s previous Rebbe, lived there, and the building is revered by many in the Chabad community. Three dozen replicas of 770 have been built by Chabad around the world.
“This episode has been deeply painful for us and the entire Jewish community,” Seligson said. “The synagogue carries profound significance to the Chabad-Lubavitch movement and the Jewish people worldwide, as the Torah teachings that have emanated from within its holy walls have positively transformed the Jewish people and indeed society at large. We look forward to the sanctity of the synagogue being restored and its light continuing to emanate to the world.”
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Correction: This story has been updated to show that the previous rebbe was Menachem Mendel Schneerson’s father-in-law, not his father.
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