It appears that Habad (also spelled Chabad)/Lubavitch has been busy digging tunnels under its headquarters in Brooklyn.
Habad is a sect of Hassidic Judaism. It’s been around for over 200 years, and is probably the best-known sect of Hassidism – mainly due to its aggressive outreach programs and philanthropy.
I was involved with Habad for about 3 years back when the Rebbe was still alive. He was the last of a long dynasty and had no successor. When I would ask what will happen when he dies, the answer was always, “Moschiach (messiah) will be here by then.” It’s been decades since he died, and the messiah has still not come.
In any event, now that an illegal tunnel system has been discovered under Habad headquarters (known by its address as simply 770), countless “Jew-watchers” (some of whom may be described as “antisemites”) are collectively saying, “AHA! We caught the Jews doing something clearly evil, nefarious, sinister and unspeakable!!” I follow some of these people on X. Not all of them are haters; some simply lack any background information – and this is an interesting piece of news, considering all the hoopla about Hamas tunnels in Gaza…
… and I assure you that they have nothing in common, except that they are tunnels. Habad is, in my opinion, a cult – but it’s not a dangerous cult. It’s a cult that people are free to join and leave at will, that helps Jews regardless of affiliation, and that does a lot of good in the Jewish world.
I’m here to inform my readers that Habad, as an organization, is not involved in organ-trafficking, the abduction of gentile children, terrorism or the manufacture of illicit weapons.
I don’t know what the tunnels are for, but I’ll guess that the main intention is a hiding place in case of antisemitic outbreaks.
Habad was founded against a background of Russian persecution against Jews. It, like other Hassidic movements, rose from the ashes of the Khmelnitsky pogroms and other anti-Jewish attacks. Taking into consideration the recent uptick in antisemitism, it wouldn’t be surprising if Habad acted as other “preppers” do, and dug tunnels just in case.
Once the tunnels were built, they probably used them for other things, such as the drunken parties Habad is famous for. In fact, when I was in Habad yeshiva, some of my peers used to have such parties in a tunnel. That tunnel was part of the infrastructure of the complex.
In conclusion, I hate to spoil the fun, but this is not an “AHA!” moment for Jew-watchers.
My proclivity these days is not to run for the tinfoil until I’ve already worn out Occam’s razors. I figured that this had to be not so nefarious, in contrast to the way so much of the sector is treating it with ontological certitude.
Although I wonder why this is even news beyond New York.
Too many crazies on X go straight for the most outlandish theories they can think of; they’re truly hysterical.
Also, they wanted to constantly meet during Covid. It is said that they built the tunnels to go to the synagogue.
I used to read the ZMan blog regularly. I could put up with his thinly veiled anti-semitism (and the less-thinly veiled of too many of his commenters), because he is right on a number of issues and writes very eloquently. But when he devoted no fewer than three blog entries to the tunnel issue, I gave up.
I think you should drop him from your blog roll.
Thanks for the heads up. I might as well; my blog roll is overcrowded anyway.