Hotel that asked Yeshiva University’s basketball team to leave over coronavirus has Jewish owners
Students on Yeshiva University’s Wilf Campus in upper Manhattan Wednesday, after the school announced it would partially close the campus after a student of the university was confirmed by health officials to have coronavirus. Image by Getty
By Ari Feldman March 6, 2020
A Baltimore-area hotel that asked the basketball team of Yeshiva University, which has one confirmed student infected with coronavirus, to spend the night before their first playoff game at another hotel has Jewish owners, according to a statement from hotel management.
The DoubleTree in Pikesville, a heavily Orthodox suburb of Baltimore, called the Yeshiva team about cancelling their reservation on Thursday afternoon, less than an hour before the team arrived at the hotel. The school ended up reserving hotel rooms for the team in downtown Baltimore.
Follow along with live updates about coronavirus in the Jewish community here.
The team’s coach called the incident “discrimination.”
“I made it very clear to the hotel that it’s discrimination,” Elliot Steinmetz told the AP. “I basically said to them: ‘Do you have a checkbox on your website that says that you’ve been in an area with suspected coronavirus?’ And they said no. So I said: ‘Is it just for the guests of Yeshiva University?’ And they said yes. I told them that that’s called discrimination.”
The coach later clarified to the New York Post that he did not consider the incident to be evidence of religious discrimination.
The hotel said that it helped relocate the team and that they were taking precautionary measures, as Yeshiva closed its main campus in upper Manhattan earlier this week after a student at the school was confirmed to have coronavirus. The student has not been on the campus since February 27, according to the school, and the school has not reported any additional cases.
Pikesville is the center of the Baltimore area’s Orthodox population, with multiple synagogues in the suburb. The hotel markets itself in a separate website from its main page as a destination for Jewish events that require kosher catering.
The Yeshiva team plays its first round playoff game at 1:45 p.m. EST today, against Worcester Polytechnic Institute. On Friday morning, the NCAA announced that there would be no spectators allowed at upcoming tournament games. You can stream the game live online here.
Ari Feldman is a staff writer at the Forward. Contact him at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter @aefeldman
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning journalism this Passover.
In this age of misinformation, our work is needed like never before. We report on the news that matters most to American Jews, driven by truth, not ideology.
At a time when newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall. That means for the first time in our 126-year history, Forward journalism is free to everyone, everywhere. With an ongoing war, rising antisemitism, and a flood of disinformation that may affect the upcoming election, we believe that free and open access to Jewish journalism is imperative.
Readers like you make it all possible. Right now, we’re in the middle of our Passover Pledge Drive and we still need 300 people to step up and make a gift to sustain our trustworthy, independent journalism.
Make a gift of any size and become a Forward member today. You’ll support our mission to tell the American Jewish story fully and fairly.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
Only 300 more gifts needed by April 30
