Extremist students from an ultra-Orthodox Hasidic group secretly hired migrant laborers to help them build a controversial tunnel at the sect’s world headquarters in Crown Heights — all to fulfill what they felt was a religious obligation to expand the holy site, The Post has learned.
Six renegade members of the Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidic movement secretly began digging the 3-foot-high, 20-foot-wide, 50-foot-long tunnel themselves, using crude instruments and their hands. They stuffed the dirt into their pockets so that their work wouldn’t be detected by the sect’s leaders and wider community, a source in the orthodox community told The Post.
“You’ve seen the movie ‘The Shawshank Redemption’? That’s what these young men did at first: They dug and put the dirt in their pockets,” said Eitan Kalmowitz, a member of the Lubavitcher community in Crown Heights.
Later, the men, most of them in their teens and early twenties, took up a collection and hired a group of migrant laborers to finish the job, Kalmowitz said, describing the workers as “Mexicans.”
Hellbound and Down 