After significant backlash for denying Jewish passengers to board a connecting flight to Budapest from New York in Frankfurt, Lufthansa's CEO apologized for the incident during a 30-minute talk with Rabbi Yehuda Teichtal, the rabbi of Berlin’s Jewish community.
"Antisemitism has no place in this airline, but with over 100,000 employees, it’s always possible there are some bad apples," Lufthansa CEO Carsten Spohr said during the talk.
"This incident should never have happened and the employees involved have been suspended, pending the airline’s investigation into what happened," he said.
The CEO stressed that Lufthansa stands for connecting people and cultures and that this incident was the antithesis of that. "The refusal to transport the Jews on the flight was not acceptable and the words used by the Lufthansa employee about punishing all Jews on the flight for the sins of the few were not company policy or acceptable behavior," Spohr said.
Lufthansa’s head office reached out to Teichtal to set up the video chat; the rabbi said that the CEO’s apologies sounded genuine and personal.
According to the DansDeals travel blog, which first broke the story, some passengers on a flight from New York to Frankfurt had not complied with COVID-19 masking mandates, including some of the identifiably Jewish passengers traveling to visit the tomb of Rabbi Yeshaya Steiner of Kerestir in Hungary. Jewish passengers had also reportedly irritated the flight crew by praying in the plane’s aisles.
“We confirm that a larger group of passengers could not be carried yesterday on Lufthansa flight LH1334 from Frankfurt to Budapest because the travelers refused to wear the legally mandated [medical] mask on board,” Lufthansa told DansDeals.
After the flight from New York had landed in Frankfurt, the Jewish passengers waited to board their connecting flight – but the visibly Jewish passengers were denied boarding.
“I’m not with the group,” one Jewish traveler said in a video of the incident. “Is this a Lufthansa decision that all Jewish people that were on the flight can’t get on any flight today? Because this is 2022 and this is a Western country and this has to go to upper management.”
"This 'apology' is a cop-out," wrote DansDeals. "It calls the denied passengers a large group, when in fact there were several dozen Jews on the flight who were denied boarding, despite not being part of any group! This apology skirts the primary issue of racial profiling by Lufthansa employees."
Michael Starr contributed to this story.