Nineteen frum Jewish women who were blocked from boarding a flight from Amsterdam to the U.S. last summer have sued, alleging they were discriminated against.

The girls were preparing to board the second leg of a trip from Ukraine to the U.S. via Amsterdam on Thursday, August 5th after visiting mekomos kedoshim in Hungary, Poland, and Ukraine, when they were told they cannot board over eating outside of designated mealtimes on the first leg of the flight. The mealtimes were the only time that passengers were allowed to remove their masks on the flight.

In a discrimination suit now filed by the women against Delta and KLM Royal Dutch Airlines, they say that they only removed their masks to eat the kosher food that they had brought along with them and that flight crews never told them that their actions violated mask rules on the aircraft.

The suit says that no other passengers were punished for removing their masks to eat their own food and that they were targeted “solely for the purpose of unlawfully harassing plaintiffs because of their Jewish race, ethnicity, and/or religion.”

The lawsuit also alleges that 2 of the 19 girls not allowed on the second flight weren’t even on the first flight and thus couldn’t have possibly violated the mask rules.

The group ended up taking a train to Antwerp and spent Shabbos there before taking a flight from Brussels to Newark Airport on Sunday.

(YWN World Headquarters – NYC)