Tennis Team Sues Over Matches on Shabbat
A seniors’ tennis team from New York has gone to a court of law to keep from playing a tournament on Shabbat.
The 12-member team from Long Island filed a discrimination lawsuit on Friday in Manhattan federal court against the United States Tennis Association for refusing to reschedule the Eastern Adult Section Championships in Schenectady, N.Y., which is set for Sept. 27-29. The team includes nine Orthodox Jews.
The suit calls on the court to file an injunction to reschedule the tournament, for players 55 and over, so the team is not required to play matches on Saturday.
In order to avoid a conflict with Shabbat, the Long Islanders had offered to play three matches on Sunday, the New York Post reported.
The USTA responded that playing three matches in one day could put the senior players at risk. The organization also said that it had pushed the tournament forward by one day to accommodate the second day of Rosh Hashanah, according to the Post.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO