Lufthansa compensates Jewish travellers denied boarding pass

Admin l Thursday, December 1, 2022

 

BERLIN – Germany’s flagship airline Lufthansa has paid out compensation to Orthodox Jewish travellers who were denied onward flights to Budapest in May.

An agreement had been reached with the “vast majority of passengers,” a company spokesman confirmed on Thursday, without giving further details, following a report by the aviation industry news service Simply Flying.

According to the report, Lufthansa is to pay each individual passenger affected $21,000 in compensation, which would lead to a total cost of about $2.6 million.

On May 4 this year, 128 Orthodox Jews arriving in Frankfurt from New York were excluded from the onward flight to Budapest after some passengers on the Atlantic flight had allegedly refused to wear face-masks.

Apparently, the only reason given for exclusion of the whole group by Lufthansa staff was the external appearance of the passengers.

In retrospect, Lufthansa had regretted “that the larger group was not allowed to continue their journey instead of limiting this decision to individual persons.”

Lufthansa boss Carsten Spohr had asked representatives of the Jewish community in Germany for an apology and wrote in a message to employees that “anti-Semitism has no place at Lufthansa.”