An 81-year-old woman has launched a discrimination lawsuit against Israeli airline El Al, claiming she was forced to move seats after an Ultra-Orthodox man complained about having to sit next to a woman.
Renee Rabinowitz, a retired lawyer with a Ph.D. in educational psychology who lives in Jerusalem, was seated in business class on a flight from Newark to Tel Aviv in December when the man sitting in the window seat next to her made it clear he did not want to sit next to a woman. A flight attendant offered Rabinowitz, who walks with a cane, a different seat. "Despite all my accomplishments — and my age is also an accomplishment — I felt minimized,” she told the Times. “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?"
A liberal advocacy group, the Israel Religious Action Center, has taken up Rabinowitz's case, noting that the airline has a long tradition of putting up with the sexist demands of Ultra-Orthodox men, despite claiming they don't discriminate against passengers. In this particular instance, the group says they have a real argument against the airline, since a flight attendant suggested the move—when Rabinowitz asked the attendant if he was relocating her because of her seatmate, "he said ‘yes’ without any hesitation," she told the Times.
"The flight attendant treated me as if I was stupid," Rabinowitz, who escaped Nazi-occupied Belgium with her family in 1941, said, "but that’s a common problem in Israel if you don’t speak Hebrew. They assume things about you. They assume they can put one over you."
In the Ultra-Orthodox tradition, physical contact between men and women is forbidden outside of marriage, though some scholars say men can sit next to women on public transportation. This is a common problem on planes—in 2014, for instance, several flights from JFK Airport to Tel Aviv were delayed when ultra-Orthodox passengers refused to sit next to women, with one female passenger arguing in a petition: "Why does El Al Airlines permit female passengers to be bullied, harassed, and intimidated into switching seats which they rightfully paid for and were assigned to by El Al Airlines? One person's religious rights do not trump another person's civil rights."
