Woman Sues El Al For Moving Her to Accomodate Orthodox Man

Image by Getty Images

By Maia Efrem February 26, 2016

An 81-year-old woman is suing El Al Airlines after she was forced to move seats to accommodate an Orthodox man during a December flight from Newark to Tel Aviv.

In an , Renee Rabinowitz said she was settled in her aisle seat for the long flight to Israel when a Hasidic man assigned to the window seat refused to sit next to her because of Orthodox modesty laws. Rabinowitz, a retired attorney with a Ph.D. in educational psychology who made aliyah ten years ago, said she reluctantly agreed when a flight attendant offered her a “better” seat closer to first class.

”Despite all my accomplishments — and my age is also an accomplishment — I felt minimized,” Rabinowitz said. “For me this is not personal, it is intellectual, ideological and legal. I think to myself, here I am, an older woman, educated, I’ve been around the world, and some guy can decide that I shouldn’t sit next to him. Why?”

A recent online petition accused El Al of gender discrimination during delayed or disrupted flights due to ultra-Orthodox men refusing to sit next to women.

El Al released a statement defending the incident, “El Al flight attendants are on the front line of providing service for the company’s varied array of passengers,” the statement said. “In the cabin, the attendants receive different and varied requests and they try to assist as much as possible, the goal being to have the plane take off on time and for all the passengers to arrive at their destination as scheduled.”

Now the Religious Action Center, which has been looking for a perfect test case to sue El Al for discrimination in just these types of incidents, is going to bat for Rabinowitz. In a letter to El Al, the organization argued “that a request not to be seated next to a woman differed from other requests to move, say, to sit near a relative or a friend, because it was by nature degrading.” They are demanding $13,000 in compensation for Rabinowitz.

Rabinowitz, who has been thinking about the incident, wondered “When did modesty become the sum and end all of being a Jewish woman?”

Maia Efrem is the former research editor and assistant to the editor and was also responsible for the Forward’s annual Salary Survey. Previously she served as the editor of Blognik Beat, a blog written by students who emigrated from or have ties to the Former Soviet Union. Maia is a graduate of Hunter College and Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism.

A message from our Publisher & CEO 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.

The coming year promises to be filled with more complex and historic developments. We are entering an era where independent, fact-based Jewish journalism will be more important than ever. We need to be ready for whatever 2025 will bring, and with your help, we can be.

We’ve set a goal to raise $260,000 by December 31. That’s an ambitious goal, but one that will give us the resources we need to invest in the high quality news, opinion, analysis and cultural coverage that isn’t available anywhere else.

If you feel inspired to make an impact, now is the time to give something back. Join us as a member at your most generous level.

— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO