A woman isn’t happy she was told to move seats for a man.
HOW would you feel if you’d gone to the effort of selecting your favourite seat on the plane well in advance, only for a flight attendant to ask you to move once you finally got on board?
The reason? A male passenger doesn’t want to sit next to you, because you’re a woman.
That’s what happened to Renee Rabinowitz, who had purchased a business class seat on an El Al flight from Newark, US to Tel Aviv, Israel in December, the NYTimes reports.
According to the 81-year-old, she’d taken her seat when “this rather distinguished-looking man in Hasidic or Haredi garb, I’d guess around 50 or so, shows up”.
The ultra-orthodox man was meant to sit in the window seat next to her, but refused under the strict interpretation of Jewish law, which says any contact with someone of the opposite sex is forbidden — even accidental.
After a conversation between the man and the flight attendant, the crew member told Ms Rabinowitz to come and look at a “better” seat closer to first class.
She then briefly argued with the man over the seating arrangement who said, “It’s in the Torah”.
The former lawyer, who escaped the Nazis as a child, took a stand in more ways than one — moving seat at the time but later deciding to take action against the airline over her treatment.
“Despite all my accomplishments, and my age is also an accomplishment, I felt minimised,” she said in a recent interview.
“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?”
Ultra-Orthodox Jewish men check in for a flight.
The advocacy group the Israel Religious Action Center plans to sue the airline on Ms Rabinowitz’s behalf this week.
“We needed a case of a flight attendant being actively involved,” explained the group’s director, Anat Hoffman, “to show that El Al has internalised the commandment, ‘I cannot sit next to a woman.’”
But an El Al spokeswoman denies the claim, telling the NYTimes, “any discrimination between passengers is strictly prohibited.”
She continued: “El Al flight attendants are on the front line of providing service for the company’s varied array of passengers. 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.”
Ms Rabinowitz’s case is far from an isolated one. In 2014, hundreds of ultra-Orthodox Jewish men caused chaos on an El Al flight by refusing to sit next to women.
As people boarded the flight, the men began asking women to change seats so they didn’t have to sit next to them, some even offering them money to do so, witnesses told Ynet. When some women refused, including one who was sitting with her husband and identified herself as Galit, the men stood in the aisles, delaying the flight’s departure.
The men eventually sat down, allowing the plane to take off, but then many got up and blocked the aisles.
“I went to the bathroom, and it was mission impossible,” Galit said.
Ultra-Orthodox men refuse to sit next to women on El Al flight, causing '11-hour-nightmare'http://t.co/rbMpAv8uGX http://pic.twitter.com/sGnWZPE061
— Oren Kessler (@OrenKessler) September 25, 2014
In April last year, Francesca Hogi told the NYTimes of her flight experience where the man meant to sit in the window seat next to her refused to do so due to his religion. She moved for him.
The same thing happened to Laura Heywood, who ended up switching with her husband in the aisle seat so the man could take the window.
“I wasn’t rude, but I found the reason to be sexist, so I was direct,” she said.
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