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It’s not every day that one gets to see video of a Hasidic Jew crawling up out of a Brooklyn sidewalk grate like a rat escaping an exterminator, so we should all savor this moment as we try to figure out the whys and the wherefores of this startling spectacle.

At some point on Monday, officials at the Chabad Lubavitch World Headquarters in Crown Heights called in a cement truck and asked contractors to fill some Secret Jew Tunnels beneath their property with enough concrete so that either: (a) their entire synagogue would be safe from an imminent structural collapse; (b) they could hide whatever had been going on down in those Secret Jew Tunnels; or (c): both (a) and (b).

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For reasons that are only clear to the Holy Jew God and certain Jew Insiders to whom I do not have access, the sight of this cement truck did not sit well with some of the younger Chabadniks, who proceeded to dismantle plywood and drywall in a section of the synagogue that had hidden the Secret Jew Tunnels from public scrutiny. In the course of their eager acts of wanton destruction, they pulled out what appeared to be a blood-stained mattress and continued hammering away at bricks until a group of them defiantly squatted inside the giant hole in the wall, offering themselves as Jewman Shields against anyone foolish, ungodly, or sadistic enough to proceed with the cement-pouring. Police began arresting some of the Young Jew Upstarts as many in the crowd cheered the arrestees as political heroes.

Apparently, the lone Jew who’d crawled up from the sidewalk grate had clawed his way to temporary freedom via one of their designated escape tunnels.

The whole crazy scene presents quite a large kosher buffet for a goyishe cub reporter such as myself to digest. So what’s all the hubbub about, bubeleh?

On Christmas Eve, the Instagram account for something called Crown Heights Info posted a video purportedly showing the “Union Mikvah and tunnel that leads toward 770.”

For the smattering of non-Hasidim out there, a mikvah is a ritual bath used to purify one’s body, especially if you’re a dirty, dripping woman who’s on the rag. And “770” is shorthand for 770 Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn, New York, home of the Chabad Lubavitch World Headquarters.

Very few people can agree on when or why these tunnels were dug, but neighbors who lived adjacent to the Chabad complex had recently begun complaining about hearing odd sounds coming from under the ground late at night. Then a construction worker digging a water line allegedly chanced upon a part of the tunnel.

So on Monday, after Chabad officials reportedly summoned a truck to fill the tunnels with cement, a splinter group of messianic younger Chabad members got verklempt and decided that such an injustice would not — nay, could not — stand.

Of the estimated 15 million or so Jews who currently inhabit this planet, fewer than 100,000 are estimated to be Chabad (pronounced “huh-BAHD”) members. About 25,000 of those live in the United States, and around half of those are tightly clustered in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights neighborhood. Despite their small numbers, Chabad, just like the Jews en toto, wields far more influence than their numbers would suggest.

Chabad is a Hasidic dynasty founded in Russia in 1775. The last of Chabad’s group’s dynastic rabbis, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, died in Manhattan in 1994, leaving the sect with a leadership gap and all the infighting and optics wars that such power vacuums inevitably create. Schneerson’s voluminous writings and alleged humanitarian work have been recognized by every US president since Richard Nixon. Although I was unable to dig up any pictures of Nixon paying direct homage to Hasidim, I did find a snapshot of Richard and Pat Nixon at a Holocaust Memorial. But I was able to find photos of every subsequent US president — Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George Bush, Sr., Bill Clinton, George Bush, Jr., Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden — showing public deference to Chabadniks and sundry other Hasidic bigwigs and bigbeards. Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelensky can be found doing the same.

Those little scruffy Jews seem to wield otherworldly power over global heads of state.

Rabbi Schneerson was, however indirectly, involved in the Crown Heights race riot, which raged in the Brooklyn neighborhood for three days in August of 1991. The rioting started after an unmarked police escort car had led a three-car motorcade, with one car containing Schneerson, through the Brooklyn streets. The driver of the motorcade’s final car ran a red light to keep up with the others, crashed into another car, careened up onto the sidewalk, and knocked over a stone pillar, which fatally crushed a seven-year-old black boy and severely injured his female cousin. In the ensuing riots, blacks chanted, “Death to Jews!” One group of rampaging neegs stabbed and beat 29-year-old Yankel Rosenbaum to death.

The messianic younger Hasids who caused all the ruckus on Monday are said to believe that Rabbi Schneerson was the Messiah, which makes them heretics in their elders’ eyes. The rowdy young Jews are also said to mostly be transplants from Israel and further afield. They’ve also allegedly been embroiled with the leaders of the synagogue at 770 Eastern Parkway in endless legal disputes over who actually owns the land there, and it’s been a pain in everyone’s tuchus for years now.

Some have speculated that the elder Chabadniks wanted the tunnels filled with cement to hide evidence of all the satanic baby-raping, human-trafficking, and contraband-hoarding that was going on inside those dark and musty walls.

Others have suggested that synagogue members, cheap Jews that they are, merely carved out those tunnels in defiance of COVID lockdowns and to avoid all the wrangling over permits and property taxes should they have decided to expand their property above ground.

Or maybe the tunnel-diggers were just perverts who wanted to spy on naked Jewish women seeking to purge themselves of the menstrual taint.

Why in Gehenna were those tunnels there? Why did temple authorities seek to fill them with cement? Why did the younger heretical Chabadniks stage such a histrionic hissy-fit against the specter of the tunnels being forever sealed off to them?

My friends, I am not nearly Jewish enough to claim that I know any of the answers to these questions. But they are intriguing questions — I will begrudge you that much.

Even more intriguing to me, though, are the following questions: Why was Schneerson considered so powerful that he was awarded his own police-led motorcade? What is it about Chabad that makes every US president, as well as the presidents of Russia and Ukraine, bow before them like janitors offering supplication to their boss on payday? Such sights perturb me far more than random snapshots of Kabbalistic Jewmanoid Underground Tunnelers.