71 Kids, Zero Synagogues

The canard

“So they found 71 little girls in the sewers under a synagogue, and nobody is talking about it?”

The receipts

On June 10, 2026, about 71 girls from a Jewish school in Monsey, NY, on a trip to a Nyack park, climbed into a public stormwater drainage tunnel, walked roughly half a mile, and came out on their own with minor scrapes — an incident covered by CBS New York, News 12, Fox and others, with on-record quotes from Nyack's mayor. Online it was rewritten as '71 little girls found in the sewers under a synagogue, and nobody is talking about it' — but there was no synagogue (the drain runs under a public park and the village streets), nobody was 'found' (they walked in and walked out), and it was widely reported. The 'synagogue' detail is borrowed from a separate, already-debunked 2024 Brooklyn tunnel story, and the whole package is the centuries-old blood libel with a new caption.

1. 1

   Here is the entire 'horror story': on June 10, 2026, about 71 girls from a Jewish school in Monsey, New York, were on a class trip to Memorial Park in Nyack, spotted a large stormwater drainage culvert, and — being kids near a giant tunnel — went in to look. As Nyack Mayor Joe Rand described it, 'they saw the culvert, they saw the cave, and they thought, let's go take a look… and they just kept walking.' They covered roughly half a mile in the dark and came out on their own — some climbing from a sewer grate off Main Street, where a police officer spotted them, others at a riverside restaurant's patio drain. The mayor put the injuries at 'cuts and scrapes'; one girl was checked at a hospital for abdominal pain. Nobody was 'found': they walked in, and they walked out.

   [1][2]
2. 2

   The load-bearing word is 'synagogue,' and it is invented. The girls were in a municipal stormwater culvert — the system that drains the village of Nyack's rainwater, running under a public park and the streets — not beneath any house of worship. The 'synagogue' is smuggled in from an entirely different episode: the January 2024 row over a tunnel at the Chabad-Lubavitch headquarters at 770 Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn. Two unrelated events — different towns, more than two years apart — welded into one because each can be made to sound ominous if you squint.

   [1][5]
3. 3

   'Nobody is talking about it' is the calling card of a manufactured scandal — and it is flatly false. The field-trip mishap was reported by CBS New York, News 12, Fox News, Ynet, The Times of Israel and The Jerusalem Post, complete with the mayor on the record. On X, the 'under a synagogue' version was slapped with a Community Note stating the obvious: the girls 'were found in a public drainage tunnel at Nyack Memorial Park during a school outing, and not under a synagogue.' A cover-up that makes the local news and gets community-noted is not much of a cover-up.

   [3][4][2]
4. 4

   Even the story it cribs from does not say what the meme claims. The 2024 Brooklyn tunnel was real but mundane: FactCheck.org and investigators found a single 60-foot passage that students had illegally dug to expand the building after an internal schism, containing only 'dirt, tools and debris' — with 'no evidence that the tunnel had anything to do with human trafficking,' and arrests for criminal mischief, not trafficking. The viral 'child-sized soiled mattress'? It was padding wedged behind interior wood paneling for structural support. So the borrowed 'evidence' had already been debunked before it was bolted onto a busload of Monsey schoolgirls.

   [5][6]
5. 5

   Strip away the props and what is left is the blood libel — the medieval lie that Jews secretly harm children. As the ADL notes, that rhetoric 'dates back to the Middle Ages, when a monk accused the Jewish community of murdering a young boy,' and 'such conspiracies have led to violence in recent years.' The phrasing 'sewers + synagogue + little girls' exists to make a school field trip read like a crime scene. The Nexus Project said it plainly: 'a story of dozens of children getting lost on a field trip is appallingly used to spread stereotypes about Jews.' The girls did nothing but what curious kids do near an open tunnel; the only thing here that needs debunking is the caption someone bolted onto them.

   [6][3]

More canards to send