And if your name is Winston, it's just best if you stay above ground, or stick to the subway system.
Luckily ChatGPt does a pretty good impression https://chatgpt.com/s/m_6a6662e9af6c81918523fb06d1384e74
tldr the initial effort didn't seem to read the linked article so I copied and pasted the full text in
(Also pedantic, but it’s not the entire city: there’s a Manhattan eruv that covers a large part of Manhattan, while Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx have separate smaller eruvim.)
There have been some big fights about the topic: https://traditiononline.org/unpacking-the-iggerot/
Although from what I understand, Moshe Feinstein wasn’t opposed to eruvim in principle, he just viewed them as an inappropriate for a city like NYC
> following the law of the highest of high courts to the letter.
but I don't think that "there is no 'high court' at all" is one, for believers.
(Each movement has its own beis din, but there is not “high court” that unifies religious rulings across them. Which is why an eruv created by one group is often considered invalid by others.)
https://voices.sefaria.org/sheets/144163?lang=bi
(Talmudic interpretation doesn’t stress this story because it shows how much Jews love to argue, or because they can win arguments against God. It stresses the story because it demonstrates that the law has been received (“It is not in heaven”) and thus does not need to appeal to God. This, inter alia, is why nobody asks God for their opinion on eruvim.)
It also has a status page! https://eruv.nyc/
Like a lot of the rules are very fuzzy in their origin. The whole kosher business comes from a passage about "Not boiling a kid in it's mothers milk". I think most people would interpret that much more literally and you couldn't kill a child goat (kid) and boil it in it's mothers milk; and probably also extend it to other animals like cows. But I'd still think that killing a kid and putting a slice on cheese on the meat would be fine.
So if somebody is going to be obtuse with what you can do it seems like it'd be good fun to figure out all the ways around it.
Stuff like disease (i.e. most of the other rules about kosher animal prep including 'inspection',) allergies (shellfish ban), heck even pasteurization (going back to the 'boiling in milk', what are the odds that the milk hit the right temperature all throughout versus only some of it boiling, which in fact could encourage certain bad bacteria to grow, let alone whatever's in the likely uncooked meat being able to feed off the whole thing...)
Religious infighting with 2 fundamentalist sects that somehow boiled down to some people digging a tunnel connecting 2 buildings because of... reasons? Like it seems like they thought that if they built the tunnel that'd magically lead to everyone deciding "You know what, this expansion project is a good thing!"
Very bizarre.
Regardless, I'm glad it got shut down before a collapse killed someone.
The very short version is that both groups claim ownership of that building, and one of them wants to expand it significantly. Neither group is allowed to modify the building because of a court order, so the one that wants to modify it did it surreptitiously in an attempt to create facts on the ground that would modify the status quo.
(Obviously none of this is sensible, but the actual reasons are pretty quotidian.)
> four defendants refused to accept a plea deal and were set to be tried in April 2025
I can find loads of stories reporting those facts, but I can't find an account of what happened next. Did they change their pleas? Were they tried?
You can find the defendant names in this article (from the wikipedia link) [1] and then look up some basic case info by name: google "new york WebCriminal Defendant Search" and then search by defendant name + Kings Supreme Criminal Court. You'll see information like case number and next court date. You can also find similar info with "nyscef case search".
When I was clicking around, the website sometimes had language about not linking to it directly without permission so that's why no link... even though it seems a bit silly.
[1] https://www.nbcnewyork.com/brooklyn/men-charged-brooklyn-syn...
> The 13 people, all young men, pleaded not guilty in State Supreme Court in Brooklyn ... Another four defendants were absent because they were in Israel, according to their lawyer, Levi Huebner.
> Justice Adam Perlmutter ordered the defendants ... to turn over their passports.
This was unexpected though:
> stills taken from videos of the synagogue's interior as well as the room leading to the tunnel, which showed a stained mattress and high chair, respectively, fueled antisemitic conspiracy theories
> A USA Today fact-check stated that the stained mattress seen in viral videos had been removed from behind wood paneling of the synagogue rather than from the tunnel itself, undermining online speculation that the mattresses were in the tunnel
https://xcancel.com/Truthtellerftm/status/197901264211193488...
I'd say it was an utterly braindead move and pretty much everyone involved is lucky to be alive.
There's just so, so much dangerous stuff you can hit below ground - high voltage cables that really, really do not like it if you even nick them, high current cables giving off nasty electromagnetic fields, ordinary low voltage cables whose isolation is already degraded, old water, gas, steam and sewer mains that may or may not burst simply because the only thing holding together the rust is the pressure from the soil, other, maybe long forgotten tunnels...
And that's before even getting into the issue of potentially getting caved in, creating a sinkhole or an ingress avenue for stormwater.
[1]: https://sohobroadway.org/soho-broadway-block-by-belgian-bloc...
It was extraordinary, like something out of a sci-fi where an alien ship has been torn open and the mess of pipes and wires looks organic. It was also a funny case of lost tech / organizational memory -- I heard they had to ask the union to help find retired folks who had worked on the lower levels and could explain why pipes were laid out the way they were.