On Monday night, 10 men were arrested following a dispute with New York City Police Department officers at the Chabad Lubavitch World Headquarters, in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, a synagogue catering to adherents of the insular Orthodox Jewish movement. The reason: structural engineers were attempting to fill in a system of mysterious secret tunnels, which had been illegally excavated underneath the building, and a group of young men turned out to protest.
Though the story primarily focused on a small community of Orthodox Jews in New York City, with most members of the community decrying the destruction of the center, it quickly started trending nationwide. Footage of the tunnels, as well as the violent skirmishes between some of the Chabad men and the NYPD, went viral, racking up thousands of retweets on X, the website formerly known as Twitter. Following the melée, 10 men were charged with criminal mischief and reckless endangerment, with one of the men also charged with obstruction of governmental administration.
The story went viral because it was, objectively, bizarre: a small sect of Hasidic Jews had built an elaborate system of underground tunnels beneath the streets of Brooklyn, for no immediately clear reason. But it also sparked an onslaught of antisemitic conspiracy theories, with some well-known far-right personalities suggesting the tunnels were being used for nefarious trafficking purposes, playing into notorious anti-Jewish tropes, or drawing comparisons to tunnels made by the terrorist group Hamas, referring to them as “Jewish tunnels” or “Zionist tunnels.”
“Secret underground tunnels, blood soaked mattresses, baby strollers … Getting real strong ‘Simon of Trent’ vibes here,” one influencer wrote, referring to a dangerous antisemitic blood libel conspiracy theory from the Middle Ages involving the murder of a Christian child that resulted in 15 members of the Jewish community being burned at the stake. That post has racked up more than 1.2 million views on X, including 3,000 retweets.
In a statement, Jonathan Greenblatt, the director of the Anti-Defamation League, which fights antisemitism worldwide, tells Rolling Stone he finds the spread of such posts, which echo centuries-old antisemitic conspiracy theories, incredibly concerning. “It’s deeply troubling that anyone would use this incident, which the Chabad movement at large has strongly condemned, to draw inappropriate and false comparisons to Hamas tunnels in Gaza or propagate age-old antisemitic conspiracy theories, such as Jews are involved in human trafficking or organ harvesting,” Greenblatt says.
In reality, the explanation for the tunnels was (at least somewhat) more quotidian. The tunnels were the result of an ongoing dispute between the Chabad Lubavitch community and a more extremist splinter sect, which has long been embroiled in turmoil over ownership of the building housing the headquarters. Members of the splinter group believe that Rabbi Menachem Schneerson, who led the Chabad Lubavitch movement before his death at the age of 92 in 1994, is the Messiah, a claim that the mainstream Chabad movement rejects.
In 2006, a court determined that the mainstream Chabad Lubavitch community had control over the building, which is located on Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn’s heavily Hasidic Crown Heights neighborhood. Yet there has still been tension between the two groups, with the newspaper the Jewish Chronicle reporting today that about six months ago, a small group of members from the messianic movement started construction on a network of underground tunnels in order to gain illegal access to the building.
When the Chabad discovered the existence of the tunnels last December, according to the Jewish publication the Forward, it ordered a cement truck to fill them, fearing that the building would be structurally damaged by the underground network. These attempts resulted in the protests on Monday night, as well as the city’s subsequent order to temporarily close the building to conduct a review of its structural integrity.
At first, the internecine dispute between what is, essentially, two small sects of the already-small Crown Heights Orthodox Jewish community, primarily garnered only local media interest. The mainstream Chabad Lubavitch community also immediately made clear it did not endorse the tunnels, with chairman Rabbi Yehuda Krinsky issuing a statement saying, “the Chabad-Lubavitch community is pained by the vandalism of a group of young agitators who damaged the synagogue below Chabad Headquarters,” calling their actions “odious.”
On X, however, the story took off, with verified accounts known for pushing misinformation, such as that of QAnon conspiracy theorist Stew Peters (who has more than 520,000 followers) and far-right wing figure Dom Lucre (who has almost a million) using the story to promote hatred toward Jewish people. In one tweet, Lucre referred to the network as “the Jewish tunnels”; he also posted a clip of Oprah interviewing a Jewish survivor of “satanic ritualistic sex abuse” while referring to a “stained bed mattress” apparently visible in the tunnels footage and alluding to other “Jewish families around the country that engage in the same acts.” That post has more than 9,000 reshares.
Mike Rothschild, the author of the book Jewish Space Lasers: The Rothschilds and 200 Years of Conspiracy Theories (no relation to the famous family), says the onslaught of antisemitic conspiracy theories about the tunnels was particularly concerning in light of a dramatic spike in misinformation on X since its 2022 acquisition by Elon Musk, which resulted in the gutting of its trust and safety team. “If there are two things that modern conspiracy theories obsess over, it’s Jewish people and secret tunnels,” Rothschild tells Rolling Stone. “So obviously, Jewish people digging secret tunnels is going to set off alarms for people — even if the purpose of the tunnels turns out to be completely anodyne. The damage these theories do isn’t limited to the Chabad community, though. It casts all Jewish people as shifty, secretive, and clannish; doing strange things under cover of darkness for unknown purposes.”
The flurry of antisemitic conspiracy theories is also worrying given a more general increase in antisemitic crimes and hate speech in light of the Israel-Hamas war, with the Anti-Defamation League reporting a more than 337 percent rise in such reports following Hamas’s terrorist attack on Israel on Oct. 6, which left more than 1,000 people dead. Rolling Stone has previously reported that in light of the war, which has killed more than 22,000 Palestinians, many general far-right accounts have pivoted to focusing exclusively on antisemitic hate speech and spreading misinformation about Jewish people. And thanks to lax regulations on X, says Rothschild, “they have massive followings and can post anything they want with no pushback.”
“At a time of rising antisemitism worldwide, it is more important now than ever that good people stand up against Jew hatred and stop the spread of dangerous conspiracy theories that have resulted in people being killed,” says Greenblatt. “It’s our moral responsibility.”
