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Lufthansa fined record $4 million for discriminating against Jewish passengers
US authorities have fined an airline after its employees kicked all the Jews off a flight from New York. Some of them violated the rules of conduct on board.
U.S. authorities have fined German airline Lufthansa a record $4 million for discriminating against Jewish passengers. According to the U.S. Department of Transportation, the airline removed all Jews from a flight from New York after some Jews refused to comply with the airline's temporary rules because of their Orthodox status. As a result, more than 100 people were unable to fly.
The incident took place in May 2022. The passengers were flying from New York to Budapest with a stopover in Frankfurt. After the first flight, flight attendants reported to the airline's security service that several people had violated the mask-wearing rules in place on Lufthansa flights since the start of the pandemic. And, apparently, the perpetrators were some Orthodox Jews.
Frankfurt Airport did little research and simply refused to allow anyone who appeared Orthodox to board a flight to Budapest. According to NBC News, Lufthansa mistakenly assumed that all the Orthodox Jews on the flight were traveling together in a group, but it later turned out that most of them did not know each other. A total of 128 people were prevented from boarding. Many of them were making an annual pilgrimage to the grave of one of Judaism's most revered rabbis.
Deborah Lipstadt, the White House special envoy on anti-Semitism, said she initially didn't even believe the story was a hoax. "National Airline."
Lufthansa soon apologized to the victims and even to Berlin’s chief rabbi. In late July, the airline announced it was creating a chief executive officer to combat discrimination and anti-Semitism. An independent investigation commissioned by the airline found no evidence that anti-Semitism within the company led to the incident. Six months later, all of the Jews ejected from the plane received $20,000 in damages and $1,000 in compensation.
The U.S. Department of Transportation said the $4 million fine was the largest ever imposed for a civil rights violation. But that figure includes $2 million that Lufthansa has already paid to victims in a legal dispute.