Thousands of mourners crowd New York City streets for grand rabbi’s funeral

Tens of thousands of mourners have lined the streets of New York City for the funeral and procession of a popular rabbi who survived the Holocaust.

Huge crowds were filmed in Borough Park, Brooklyn for the funeral of Rabbi Yisroel Avoham Portugal, who died aged 95 on Monday.

Aerial footage captured an immense crowd of more than 100,000 mourners gathering to pay their respects to the religious leader.

People openly cried as others climbed lampposts and crowds were controlled by a large police presence and metal fences.

The funeral saw the whole area shutdown with road closures and shops did not open out of respect.

There were also chaotic scenes at the funeral as police lost control of the crowd and the hearse ran over the leg of an New York police officer, according to NBC New York.

Another officer is said to have been hit in the head with a drone.

NYPD Police Commissioner James P O'Neill said the officer who had been ran over suffered a possible broken ankle.

Commissioner O'Neill added: "There was a drone that came out of the sky and hit a police officer.

"The drone apparently ran out of gas... and it landed on the officer's head."

The Hasidic rabbi died at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, surrounded by his family, on Monday after being admitted in February.

His body needed to be transported to Baltimore to Brooklyn, which meant he was unable to be buried on the same day as his death, which is Hasidic custom.

He was born in 1924 in Romania to Rabbie Eliezer Zusia Portugal who founded the Skulen Hasidic dynasty.