Mary Roeloffs is a Forbes reporter who covers breaking news with a frequent focus on the entertainment industry, streaming, sports news, publishing, pop culture and climate change. She joined Forbes in 2023 and lives in Nashville.
The Department of Transportation has issued a $4 million fine—its largest ever against an airline for a civil rights violation—to Lufthansa for allegedly discriminating against a large group of Orthodox Jewish passengers attempting to board a flight in Frankfurt to Budapest in May 2022.
The route had 128 passengers clad in distinctive garb typically worn by Orthodox Jewish men, the DOT said, who had made the flight from New York to Frankfurt and were waiting to board their connection to Hungary, when they were told they would not be allowed onto the plane because members of their group had violated the airline's masking policy.
The airline said in a statement to Forbes Tuesday that it fully cooperated with the DOT's review and partnered with the American Jewish Committee to create a training program for its managers and employees to address antisemitism and discrimination.called it “classic antisemitism” and Deborah Lipstadt, the federal government's special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism, said it carried the"terrible, awful irony of it coming from the German national airline.
Lufthansa isn’t the first airline to face civil rights penalties, but it’s not an overly common practice. In January of 2020, Delta Air Lines was fined $50,000 after the agency found the airline discriminated against threeon two separate occasions in 2016, both of which involved removing passengers from their seats after flight attendants and fellow passengers became nervous about their behavior. United Airlines was fined $305,000 in 2022 for allegedlyagainst a Buddhist pilot.
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