Alaska Airlines has apologized for a weekend incident in which three Frum businessmen triggered security concerns by putting on Tefilin on board a flight to Los Angeles – despite repeated requests by flight attendants to stay seated with their seatbelts fastened as the aircraft flew through turbulence.
CNN reports the following:
The men began praying out loud shortly after takeoff on Flight 241 from Mexico City. Flight attendants alerted the flight deck, which then called the tower and alerted law enforcement. When the plane arrived at Los Angeles International Airport, it was met by the FBI, Customs and Border Protection and airport police.
The men were questioned, their bags searched, and it was determined they were not a threat according to the FBI.
“Alaska Airlines embraces the cultural and religious diversity of our passengers and employees. We apologize for the experience these three passengers went through after landing in Los Angeles as well as for any inconvenience to our other customers onboard,” Alaska Airlines spokeswoman Bobbie Egan said.
Alaska Airlines said it plans to update its awareness training of Orthodox Jews and is reaching out to the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle for help.
The airline issued the apology after conducting an internal review of Sunday’s incident, and said it wasn’t just the prayers that worried the flight crew.
“Flight attendants observed unusual behavior from three male passengers that continued during the four-hour flight,” Egan said in a statement issued late Monday.
“Out of concern for the safety of all of the passengers on board, the crew erred on the side of caution and authorities were notified. The crew did not realize at the time that the passengers were Orthodox Jews engaging in prayer ritual in Hebrew.”
Egan said three specific instances that went beyond the men’s prayers appeared to be unusual behavior to the crew:
Flight attendants instructed everyone to stay seated with their seatbelts fastened as the aircraft flew through turbulence shortly after takeoff. The three passengers disregarded repeated requests, however, and stood up several times to retrieve objects from their luggage in the overhead bin that the crew had never seen, including small black boxes fastened with what appeared to be black tape. The crew learned after the plane landed that these were tefillin boxes worn during the prayer ritual.
The men prayed aloud together in a language unfamiliar to the crew while wearing what appeared to be black tape and wires strapped to their forearms and foreheads and wires on their chests. Their actions and behavior made some other travelers and the crew uneasy. The three passengers responded, but provided very little explanation, to a flight attendant’s questions about the tefillin boxes and what they were doing.
Later in the flight, two of the three passengers visited the lavatories together while the third waited in the aisle and continually looked around the cabin and toward the flight deck door. Flight attendants thought he appeared anxious, as if he were standing guard.
During weekday prayers, some Orthodox Jewish men wear teflillin, or phylacteries – black leather straps wrapped around the left arm and around the forehead. The straps are connected to small boxes with tiny scrolls containing Jewish scriptures. Many Orthodox Jewish men also wear a prayer shawl called a tallit under their clothes, with knotted fringes at each of the four corners.
Rabbi Motti Seligson, a spokesman for Chabad-Lubavitch, an Orthodox Jewish movement, explained the ritual further to CNN:
Tefillin are two leather black boxes with sacred parchment inside hand-crafted by a special scribe. The boxes are bound on the arm and head during prayer to spiritually align the mind and heart. I would encourage airlines to sensitize its employees to the salient effect of the tefillin ritual – and would be more than happy to put them in touch with local rabbis who can teach their personnel more about this tradition.
According to the Anti-Defamation League, this issue comes up occasionally. Last year after a similar incident, the ADL and Chabad sent a letter and a flier to all the major airlines explaining teflillin, said Deborah Lauter, ADL’s director of civil rights.
“We understand these prayer items may not be familiar. We gave them the suggestions that they do training about it. We had hoped they would include this in their training,” Lauter said.
She said she is sending a letter to Alaska Airlines again to remind them.
Lauter said there is an onus on both parties in such a situation.
“The safety of passengers is paramount, and in this age of heightened security people are on edge. I think it’s understandable why people would have this reaction. There has to be a give and take too with the passengers. If they weren’t cooperating, that’s a different problem than religious sensitivity,” she said.
“Education is a two way street. We hope airlines will include this training with their staffs,” Lauter said. “It also wouldn’t hurt for passengers who are going to be participating in this ritual to alert the staff ahead of time.”
(Source: CNN)
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17 Responses
Not sure what “out loud” means, but I see no reason why they couldn’t daven quietly. I also don’t understand why they we’re standing when the seatbelt light was on, which is unsafe, illegal, and possibly assur.
That said I’m glad that Alaska Air appologized. I hope that flight attendants will now all be trained to identify teffilin.
I was questioned about tzitzus at a TSA checkpoint recently. Apparently they can see it with their new scanning technology, but as I was not the first one wearing it whom they encountered they quickly let me pass.
These security procedures are all meant to look for unusual activity. It is amazing how many unusual things are really normal.
Of course, they should not have been standing when everyone was instructed to sit, davening or not. Davening and being frum does not give someone the right to break the rules.
maybe Alaska Airlines should have read the story last year
on the flt to Pittsburg I believe it was with a 17 year old putting on Teffilin. no excuse for this especially after
last years same incident.
Has the Transportation Safety Administration included information about tefillin in the training of the airport baggage inspectors. To date there have been no reports of inspectors’ confiscating tefillin, or breaking them open to see what is concealed inside the “wooden boxes”. Or are the baggage inspectors accepting the explanations of the passengers that the leather straps and boxes are religious articles. Or are the baggage inspectors just not seeing or finding tefillin?
I thought that most poskim rule not to stand by tefilla on a plane. In any case why would they daven aloud?
The first paragraph says it all.
Why does anyone believe the above CNN report claiming they were noisy or whatever?
#5 zurich: No. But even if “most” did, if their posek said otherwise, they must stand for S”E.
I am sure the flight attendants had to embellish it a bit so they didnt look stupid. I think they made up about half of it.
They davened “aloud” but when you talk to your seatmate you have to SCREAM so how loud could they have been already???
“… a language unfamiliar to the crew…” but if they were yishmaelim yemach sh’mom chating in arabic, the flight crew would have known?
“… stood up several times to retrieve objects from their luggage in the overhead bin that the crew had never seen, including small black boxes fastened with what appeared to be black tape.” How many times does one have to go into the overhead bins? And they took out the “small black boxes” without a zekel? Uh huh, sure!!
2. But being frum means you should not listen to loshon hora and automatically assume what is reported is halocha l’moshe m’sinai. This story has more holes than swiss cheese!
4. X-rays see thru them. TSA knows about them and all it will take would be one person to I dont want to say what in them and we will all suffer unless we are carrying a carpet.
6. It says that the flight attendants goofed and they looked like idiots so they had to save face.
5. You should ask your posek again because you are not really well versed in halocha.
#1: It is amazing how many unusual things are really normal. Huh? Imagine if some muslim said he was wearing some religious garment under his clothes. You’d be all over the flight attendants for “believing” his claim. In fact, you’d claim they were derelict in their duties. Why not just call over the stewardess beforehand and explain to her? We all know the situation today. A little sechel and forethought and the problem is solved before becoming a problem.
Maybe 2hotinPhx you should read the article, you would see they mentioned that.
They should have told the flight attendants what they were going to do – when I daven on the plane I always tell them. I’ve done it several times, and never had any issues – in fact people are quite interested. Clearly when this happens, it’s a message from Hashem to the people involved.
The scary thing is that it shows that no lessons are ever learned, if flight attendants from this flight didn’t learn what had happened on the flight last year when the similar thing happened, how many other important things have they not learned.
I traveled on Alaska Air last week for the first time and I found the crew to be rude, pompous and unhelpful, very unlike the crew on the other airlines I flew (Delta and American). So this does not surprise me. I guess I’ll have to look for a different airline when I want to visit Alaska.
Grandmaster: Then perhaps they shouldn’t be davening at that time. As I said, davening does not trump airline safety rules.
Even though you are a Grandmaster – must stand ? I don’t think so .
Would everyone please remember that the number of people who are commanded to don tefillin is less than 7,000,000, whereas the world population is 6,600,000,000. That means that only about 1 of every 1,000 people on the planet have to be familiar with tefillin. That’s a teeny weeny (to use a technical mathematical term) number. Lots of people, including the bulk of the non-frum Jewish population, have never even seen tefillin and don’t know what they are. So when you pull out a pair of boxes with leather straps on them on an airplane, you are doing something that most of the world has never seen. Get used to it. We are special. We are chosen. It would be nice if the whole world, or even the entire airline industry, knew what tefillin were, and when Moshiach comes, they will. But in the meantime, as the English said prior to the 20th century, don’t scare the horses in the street. Don’t expect the 99.9% of the world who are not commanded to don tefillin to know what they are, or that they are harmless (actually, they are a powerful force against evil).
to #12 BM
I did read the article. If the flight attendents would have read about this from last year there would have been NO incident. Odd how someone like you totally missed the point I was making. Now explain to me why the first article about this, mentioned nothing about the same thing happening a year prior?
mamashtakah: Some flights consume the entire zman tefila, necessitating wearing tefilin en route.