Eighteen teenaged Jewish girls have been kicked off a flight from Amsterdam to New York for the second time in a day, and will be forced to spend Shabbos in Europe, because of what they describe as antisemitism by officials of KLM/Delta Airlines.
This account of the flight is based on Hamodia interviews with askanim in New York including Rabbi Yisroel Kahan of Oizrim Jewish Council and Joel Rosenfeld of Bobov, as well as interviews with relatives of the girls. Hamodia asked KLM and Delta to give detailed responses, but the airlines’ statements only had generic allegations of “unruly behavior” and “refus[ing] to comply with crew instructions.”
The teenagers were part of a group of 56 girls that had been touring Jewish sites in Europe. Upon arrival in Amsterdam at the start of their trip on July 20, a KLM/Delta security official at the airport claimed the girls had behaved improperly on the flight, cursed at flight crew and not followed mask guidelines. The girls denied these allegations, saying they fully complied with all rules and wore masks except when eating. The official threatened that they would be blacklisted from the airline. Askanim in New York were contacted and investigated the matter, and determined that no one had been placed on any blacklist.
When their two-week trip concluded, the girls, most of whom live in Monsey, Williamsburg or Boro Park, had a flight back to New York on Thursday, from Ukraine with a stopover in Amsterdam.
On the KLM flight from Ukraine, the flight crew was “harassing the girls the entire time,” according to a brother of one of the girls, who had spoken to his sister on the phone about the incident.
“Every few minutes, they were coming over to the girls, saying, ‘Fix your mask,’ even though the masks were on properly the entire time,” said the brother, who declined to give his name. “Then, when the girls started eating, the flight attendants said they were not allowed to eat because it was not the official meal time, but they didn’t say a word about the mask.”
When the group attempted to board the connecting flight in Amsterdam for New York, 18 of them were denied entry and told they could not board the flight. No specific reason was given. These are the first 18 girls on the group’s list in alphabetical order; all have last names beginning with A through K. The airline says these girls were booked in as one group.
The official who banned the girls from the plane was the same one who had threatened to blacklist them two weeks earlier. Read more at Hamodia
