(VINnews) — After over three days of exhausting travel and after suffering indignities and humiliation at the hands of two airline companies, the 18 chareidi girls who were singled out and persecuted on their return from the Ukraine have finally landed at Newark airport courtesy of United Airlines.
When they arrived at Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport on Thursday evening, the girls were detained and told to pay a huge fine of $3000 after it was claimed that they had eaten food on their plane outside meal times in violation of COVID-19 guidelines. The girls had been forced to eat their own food outside the designated mealtime because the flight did not carry food that complied with their community’s kosher standards.
At the same time, the Delta-KLM airline which they were traveling with singled them out for abusive treatment, harassing them for not wearing masks even as other passengers were not berated for similar violations. When they switched seats they were insulted by the flight attendants, who were described by relatives of the girls as “rude and impatient.” The girls claim that they were singled out from 50 other passengers due to the airline staff’s animosity towards Jews.
The group was later denied its request to board a later flight that would have still gotten them to New York before the start of Shabbat, when observant Jews are not allowed to travel by airplane. Eventually they were forced to fly to Antwerp where they were hosted by the local Jewish community.
On Sunday morning the group finally arrived in Newark airport and made their way to their homes
