A retired lawyer who fled the Nazis as a child is suing the Israeli national airline El Al for alleged discrimination after being asked to move on a plane when an ultra-Orthodox Jew objected to sitting next to a woman.
Renee Rabinowitz, 81, is being supported by the Israel Religious Action Center, which has campaigned against ultra-Orthodox efforts to enforce the segregation of men and women and to have images of women removed from public hoardings.
Almost 7,500 emails have been sent by members of the public to El Al objecting to requests made to women passengers to change seats.
Rabinowitz, a Jew who attends synagogue and keeps a kosher home, told the Guardian: “The man had no other reason to complain than my gender – and that’s unlawful discrimination. It’s no different than if a person of another religion had said: ‘I don’t want to sit next to a Jew.’ And I don’t believe El Al would move a person in those circumstance.”
On 2 December last year, Rabinowitz settled into her business class seat on an El Al flight from New York to Tel Aviv following a visit to the US to see family. Her seat was one of a pair separated by a screen.
Shortly before the plane doors closed, a passenger who had been allocated the window seat next to Rabinowitz boarded. The middle-aged man, who was wearing ultra-Orthodox garb, called a flight attendant and spoke to him in Hebrew.
Rabinowitz said the flight attendant then offered Rabinowitz what he described as a better seat, one of the central row of three nearer the first class cabin. “I didn’t understand. It wasn’t a better seat,” she said.
She said she initially declined to move, but the flight attendant pressed her further and as the plane was close to taking off, she felt she had no alternative. Using her walking stick, Rabinowitz followed him to the front of the business class section.
“I asked the flight attendant point blank if the man sitting next to me had asked me to be moved, and unabashedly he said yes. I then went back to the man and said: ‘I’m an 81-year-old woman, what’s your problem?’
“He started to tell me it was forbidden by the Torah. I interrupted him to say the Torah says nothing about a man sitting next to a woman. He conceded I was right, but said there was a general principle that a person should not put himself in a dangerous situation.
“I had to do some quick thinking. He was wrong, but we had an 11-hour flight ahead of us. It’s not so pleasant to be sitting with a person who would rather you weren’t there. So I decided to move.”
After the plane landed at Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion airport, as Rabinowitz waited on board for wheelchair assistance, the captain emerged from the cockpit. She told him what had happened, and said she felt insulted for being asked to move simply because of her gender.
“He said it was not up to the staff, but was company policy,” said Rabinowitz.
Back home in Jerusalem, Rabinowitz attended a public meeting at which Anat Hoffman, IRAC’s executive director, spoke about the organisation’s successful campaign to end gender segregation on Israel’s public buses at the demand of the ultra-Orthodox. Since IRAC won a court case on the issue, buses now carry prominent notices informing passengers they may sit where they wish.
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