Notes From the Underground

The year’s first megaviral moment arrived when videos of a clash between NYPD officers and male students belonging to the Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidic movement hit social media in January. The pupils sought to defend an illicit sixty-foot ramshackle excavation under 770 Eastern Parkway, the global headquarters for the organization, which houses a synagogue and a yeshiva and serves as the home of its leading rabbis.

In one video, a young man climbs out of a busted grate on the sidewalk. Conflicting narratives soon emerged: over the true goal of the tunnel, how long it had been underway, and how the project figures into a decades-long legal battle between Chabad’s leadership and the smaller ultramessianic sect to which the tunneling youngster belongs and which has long blocked expansion plans for the building.

If the cultural context proved alien to many viewers, one element of the episode should be familiar to NYRA readers: rowdy, pro-development young men fed up with bureaucracy and entrenched political gridlock agitating for new construction at all costs. Yes In My Basement Yeshiva!