The girls were removed from a Delta flight on Friday morning.
- Insider previously reported that the Orthodox Jewish girls were barred from boarding a Delta flight on Thursday.
- The next day, the girls were ordered off a second Delta flight for trying to switch seats.
Their rabbi told Insider that he thinks antisemitism is at play.
A group of Orthodox Jewish girls who were barred from boarding a flight from Amsterdam to New York on Thursday evening was kicked off another Delta Air Lines flight the next day, according to their rabbi.
The 18 teenagers, part of a group who had been visiting religious sites in Ukraine, were initially disallowed from traveling on a Delta flight home due to a dispute over COVID-19 protocols on the KLM-operated leg of their journey from Kyiv to Amsterdam, Insider previously reported.
A day later, Delta allegedly kicked off the same girls for swapping seats on a Friday morning flight, Rabbi Yisroel Kahan claimed in an interview with Insider.
Kahan accused Delta of antisemitism. “With antisemitism, if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck,” he said.
After the girls were banned from boarding the flight on Thursday evening, Kahan said, the group slept on benches at Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport while he and a chaperone tried to arrange their journeys home.
The Orthodox Jewish teens slept at Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport while their rabbi tried to arrange another flight.
Yisroel Kahan
Kahan said that he started calling New York lawmakers, including Sen. Chuck Schumer, to reach out to Delta to remedy the situation.
Schumer reportedly stepped in, the rabbi said, and Delta executives personally called the parents of the stranded girls and arranged a Delta flight from Amsterdam to New York for Friday morning.
Schumer did not immediately respond to Insider’s request for comment.
On Friday morning, the girls boarded the Delta flight to New York from Amsterdam but, shortly after, Kahan said the girls were asked to leave. “Ten minutes later, the phone rings,” he said. “They’re being taken off the plane.”
The rabbi claims that one of the girls was asked to swap seats by a mother who wanted to be seated next to her son. “The minute they made the swap, a stewardess made a beeline to the girl and said, ‘You’re misbehaving, you’re kind of on thin ice, to begin with, get off the plane,'” he said.
A video seen by Insider appears to show a woman confirming that she asked to switch seats and that this led to the girls being asked to leave the flight.
Although the girl returned to her assigned seat, Kahan said, the entire group of teenagers was told to leave the flight. He said that the woman was allowed to remain on the plane because it was her “first transgression,” he said.
The rabbi said that, although he hates to “throw that card out there,” he thinks the incidents reeks of antisemitism.
“Either you’re telling me that you know that each and everyone one of them was violating rules on both flights,” Kahan added. “Or you’re telling me that you banned the entire group, a group of one ethnicity, for this misbehavior.”
The girls were removed and booked onto a Delta flight for later that day but declined to travel on it because it would have involved returning to their homes after the start of Shabbat – the Jewish day of rest when observant Jews are not allowed to travel by car or plane.
Instead, they spent the night in Antwerp, Belgium, and traveled home to New York with United Airlines on Sunday morning.
In an email to Insider, a Delta spokesperson said: “We apologize to our customers on Delta Flight 47, Amsterdam to New York-JFK, who were delayed and inconvenienced to remove a group of passengers who refused to comply with crew instructions. The flight departed approximately two hours after its originally scheduled time.”
Read the original article on Business Insider
