Lufthansa fined $4M for banning 128 Jewish passengers from flight in alleged antisemtic incident

German national carrier Lufthansa on Tuesday was slapped with a $4 million fine by the US Department of Transportation for booting 128 Jewish passengers from a flight after an airline staffer reportedly fumed that “everyone has to pay” for the mistakes of a few.The airline allegedly discriminated against the group of Orthodox Jewish passengers — who were wearing traditional black garb — while they were trying to board in Frankfurt during a stopover for their trip from New York’s JFK airport to Budapest, Hungary, in May 2022.Some of the passengers allegedly had violated the airline’s mask policy, leading a Lufthansa worker to bark out that “everyone has to pay” for the mistakes of a few and that “everyone” deemed to be “Jewish coming from JFK” would be prohibited from the connecting flight, according to video of the incident that went viral at the time.The airline employee was seen telling the passengers that “it was the Jewish people who were the mess, who made the problems.”Although many of the passengers did not know each other or were not traveling together, boarding on the connecting flight was denied to those that the staffers determined were Jewish because they were wearing a yarmulke or had side curls, known as payot in Hebrew, German media reported.“No one should face discrimination when they travel, and today’s action sends a clear message to the airline industry that we are prepared to investigate and take action whenever passengers’ civil rights are violated,” Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said in a statement.The incident led Ambassador Deborah Lipstadt, the Biden-Harris administration’s special envoy against antisemitism — to condemn the airline for “classic antisemitism.” “[When] I first heard it, I said, ‘Oh, this must be wrong.

Someone must be misreporting this.’ And then of course, it turned out to be precisely right — and worse than we even thought,” Lipstadt, renowned Holocaust hi...