Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Make a Passover gift and support Jewish journalism. DONATE NOW
Fast Forward

Couple Sues Manhattan Hotel For ‘Starving’ Guests At Daughter’s Bat Mitzvah

(JTA) — A couple is suing a Manhattan hotel for allegedly “starving” the guests at her daughter’s $37,000 bat mitzvah party.

The lawsuit against Hotel Eventi was filed in Manhattan Supreme Court, the New York Post reported Sunday.

Nancy Held, the mother of the bat mitzvah girl, said the food for her 150 guests at the party in May was so mishandled that the hungry adult guests began eating the children’s ice cream desserts.

She said in the lawsuit that the 700 hors d’oeuvres were never served to the guests as promised, and that the main course, a choice of steak or scallops, was served cold.

“We were starving,” Held’s husband, Marc, told The Post. “We were hosting the party and we didn’t have any food to eat.”

The hotel offered $1,000 and a night in a suite to make up for the errors, according to Held. The couple is suing for $637,000 in damages.

Nancy Held said in a court filing that she had been planning for her daughter’s big day ever since being misdiagnosed with a fatal genetic mutation in 2013.

The family also later discovered that the hotel was using photos of their event in promotional material, which the family had not given permission for.

This is a moment of great uncertainty. Here’s what you can do about it.

We hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, we’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s independent Jewish news this Passover. All donations are being matched by the Forward Board - up to $100,000.

This is a moment of great uncertainty for the news media, for the Jewish people, and for our sacred democracy. It is a time of confusion and declining trust in public institutions. An era in which we need humans to report facts, conduct investigations that hold power to account, tell stories that matter and share honest discourse on all that divides us.

With no paywall or subscriptions, the Forward is entirely supported by readers like you. Every dollar you give this Passover is invested in the future of the Forward — and telling the American Jewish story fully and fairly.

The Forward doesn’t rely on funding from institutions like governments or your local Jewish federation. There are thousands of readers like you who give us $18 or $36 or $100 each month or year.

Support our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

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 comply with the following:

  • Credit the Forward
  • Retain our pixel
  • Preserve our canonical link in Google search
  • Add a noindex tag 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.