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German national carrier Lufthansa on Tuesday was slapped with a $4 million fine by the US Department of Transportation for booting 128 Jewish passengers from a flight after an airline staffer reportedly fumed that “everyone has to pay” for the mistakes of a few.
The airline allegedly discriminated against the group of Orthodox Jewish passengers — who were wearing traditional black garb — while they were trying to board in Frankfurt during a stopover for their trip from New York’s JFK airport to Budapest, Hungary, in May 2022.
Some of the passengers allegedly had violated the airline’s mask policy, leading a Lufthansa worker to bark out that “everyone has to pay” for the mistakes of a few and that “everyone” deemed to be “Jewish coming from JFK” would be prohibited from the connecting flight, according to video of the incident that went viral at the time.
The airline employee was seen telling the passengers that “it was the Jewish people who were the mess, who made the problems.”
Although many of the passengers did not know each other or were not traveling together, boarding on the connecting flight was denied to those that the staffers determined were Jewish because they were wearing a yarmulke or had side curls, known as payot in Hebrew, German media reported.
“No one should face discrimination when they travel, and today’s action sends a clear message to the airline industry that we are prepared to investigate and take action whenever passengers’ civil rights are violated,” Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said in a statement.
The incident led Ambassador Deborah Lipstadt, the Biden-Harris administration’s special envoy against antisemitism — to condemn the airline for “classic antisemitism.”
“[When] I first heard it, I said, ‘Oh, this must be wrong. Someone must be misreporting this.’ And then of course, it turned out to be precisely right — and worse than we even thought,” Lipstadt, renowned Holocaust historian, said at the time.
“If any airline had done it, it would have been outrageous. But the terrible, awful irony of it coming from the German national airline was outrageous.”
The Orthodox group was taking part in a pilgrimage to the grave sites of prominent rabbinical figures in Eastern Europe.
Under the consent order, Lufthansa agreed to pay $2 million and the Department of Transportation said it will credit the airline with $2 million that it paid in compensation to passengers.
The airline had quickly issued an apology shortly after the incident.
“We regret that the large group was denied boarding rather than limiting it to the non-compliant guests,” the airline said.
“We have zero tolerance for racism, antisemitism and discrimination of any type.”
The antisemitism commissioner of the state of Hesse, where Frankfurt is located, sharply condemned the incident.
Uwe Becker said that apparently an entire group of people — solely because of their recognizable faith — had been held responsible for something that obviously only affected individual travelers.
“This is discriminatory and not a trivial matter, and all the more reason why the company’s top management should also feel personally responsible for apologizing for this incident and taking a clear and unequivocal stand,” Becker said.
Rabbi Yehuda Teichtal, a Berlin rabbi and head of the local Chabad community, said German companies should be sensitive to possible anti-Semitism in light of the country’s Nazi past.
Teichtal welcomed the fact that the chief executive of Lufthansa, Carsten Spohr, had called him to offer an apology.
With Post Wires
