El Al Vows To Boot Ultra-Orthodox Men Who Refuse To Sit Next To Women
JERUSALEM (JTA) — El Al will “immediately” remove any passenger who refuses to sit next to another passenger for any reason, its CEO announced, but not before a major Israeli tech company announced it would no longer fly its employees on the airline.
NICE System’s CEO Barak Eilam on Monday announced via posts on social media that “At NICE we don’t do business with companies that discriminate against race, gender or religion. NICE will not fly @EL AL Israel Airlines until they change their practice and actions discriminating women.”
Eilam’s announcement came days after an El Al Airlines flight from New York to Israel was delayed by more than an hour after four Haredi Orthodox men refused to take their assigned seats next to women. Two women eventually agreed to change their seats in order to allow the flight to take off.
An account of the incident was posted on Facebook by a passenger, Israeli rapper Khen Rotem.
Following the incident on Thursday evening, El Al apologized in a statement and added that: “Any discrimination by passengers is absolutely forbidden. El Al flight attendants do everything that they can to provide service to a wide range of passengers and various requests and try to assist.”
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO