Jewish passengers accuse Lufthansa of discrimination for flight ban

About 30 people were allowed to board the flight while a group of excluded passengers, including many who wore the black hats of ultra-Orthodox Jews or had Jewish-sounding names, were forced to alter their travel arrangements.Video taken at the airport shows a Lufthansa worker telling a passenger all Jewish customers arriving on a flight from New York were banned from their flight to Budapest because individuals identified as Jewish had refused to comply with the airline’s mask mandates and other rules on the first leg of the journey. Lufthansa spokesman Tal Muscal said he does not know who made the decision to bar passengers from their connecting flight.A video posted online by travel blog DansDeals captures the explanation a Lufthansa gate agent provided in an announcement when the flight departed without three-quarters of its passengers: “Due to an operational reason coming from the flight from New York, all passengers here, we have to cancel you on this flight,” the agent says. “It was Jewish people who were the mess, who made the problems.”Halpern, a 45-year-old from Long Island whose grandparents were Holocaust survivors, told the woman that picking out all Jews was “gruesome” and antisemitic.“It would have been [the same] if you were African or Polander,” she says.Halpern, who was seated in economy during the New York-to-Frankfurt flight with his 16-year-old daughter, said he saw three people reprimanded by flight attendants for refusing to wear masks. He said he was told he had to pay 11 euros for a fare difference because his flight had not been canceled.Gershon Neustadt, a Brooklyn resident in his 40s who was traveling with a friend, said he booked a Lufthansa ticket to Vienna online for $730 after customer service said it couldn’t help him.