Ultra-Orthodox Refuse To Sit by Women On El Al Flight
Haredi Orthodox men who refused to sit next to women delayed the takeoff of an El Al flight from New York to Tel Aviv.
The haredi passengers offered money to other passengers to switch seats on the flight, which arrived in Israel hours before Rosh Hashanah, Ynet reported.
Haredi passengers who could not switch their seats stood up immediately upon takeoff and remained in place, crowding the aisles and inconveniencing fellow passengers and flight attendants, Ynet reported.
“It was an 11-hour-long nightmare,” one of the passengers told Ynet.
According to passengers, the flight crew informed them that they were under no obligation to agree to switches. But the captain also said the flight would not take off with people standing.
El Al told Ynet it would look into the incident.
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