Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
The Schmooze

Woman Sues El Al For Moving Her to Accomodate Orthodox Man

An 81-year-old woman is suing El Al Airlines after she was forced to move seats to accommodate an Orthodox man during a December flight from Newark to Tel Aviv.

In an , Renee Rabinowitz said she was settled in her aisle seat for the long flight to Israel when a Hasidic man assigned to the window seat refused to sit next to her because of Orthodox modesty laws. Rabinowitz, a retired attorney with a Ph.D. in educational psychology who made aliyah ten years ago, said she reluctantly agreed when a flight attendant offered her a “better” seat closer to first class.

”Despite all my accomplishments — and my age is also an accomplishment — I felt minimized,” Rabinowitz said. “For me this is not personal, it is intellectual, ideological and legal. I think to myself, here I am, an older woman, educated, I’ve been around the world, and some guy can decide that I shouldn’t sit next to him. Why?”

A recent online petition accused El Al of gender discrimination during delayed or disrupted flights due to ultra-Orthodox men refusing to sit next to women.

El Al released a statement defending the incident, “El Al flight attendants are on the front line of providing service for the company’s varied array of passengers,” the statement said. “In the cabin, the attendants receive different and varied requests and they try to assist as much as possible, the goal being to have the plane take off on time and for all the passengers to arrive at their destination as scheduled.”

Now the Religious Action Center, which has been looking for a perfect test case to sue El Al for discrimination in just these types of incidents, is going to bat for Rabinowitz. In a letter to El Al, the organization argued “that a request not to be seated next to a woman differed from other requests to move, say, to sit near a relative or a friend, because it was by nature degrading.” They are demanding $13,000 in compensation for Rabinowitz.

Rabinowitz, who has been thinking about the incident, wondered “When did modesty become the sum and end all of being a Jewish woman?”

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.