Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Fast Forward

Jewish Community Unites In Support of Unionizing Hotel Employees

More than 100 people, including Jews from the local community and New York City, gathered outside a Hilton hotel in Stamford, Connecticut to support newly-unionized hotel employees in the fight for their first contract.

The rally on Sunday outside the Hilton Stamford Hotel & Executive Meeting Center was organized by the Jewish Labor Committee and Jews for Racial and Economic Justice. The groups were encouraged to step in when they heard learned the hotel’s staff was being pressured into not joining the union they had formed with the help of alumni from Yeshivat Hadar, a New York-based egalitarian yeshiva that had frequently booked the Hilton for retreats.

The employees are fighting for affordable healthcare and a living wage. Some employees say they receive insurance bills costing more than their paychecks, and many are overworked; housekeepers, for instance, claim they are required to clean 35 rooms in an eight-hour shift.

The rally featured singing of Hebrew and Yiddish songs and prayers, picketing, and speeches by the members of the Stamford Jewish community, many of whom are past Jewish clients of the hotel.

“I am appalled to hear about conditions at this luxury hotel,” Stamford resident Marcia Kosstrin said in a statement. “Our jobs as Jews and as human beings is to fulfill the ideals of loving kindness, justice and good deeds.”

Rabbi Eli Kohl of Young Israel of Stamford and Cantor Nancy Abramson, dean of the Jewish Theological Seminary Cantorial School, have attended negotiations in support of workers, as have rabbinic students from Hebrew Union College and the Jewish Theological Seminary.

Alyssa Fisher is a news writer at the Forward. Email her at [email protected], or follow her on Twitter at @alyssalfisher

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse..

Readers like you make it all possible. Support our work by becoming a Forward Member and connect with our journalism and your community.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join 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 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.