U.S. Fines Lufthansa Record $4 Million For Allegedly Discriminating Against Jewish Passengers

Topline

The Department of Transportation has issued a $4 million fine—its largest ever against an airline for a civil rights violation—to Lufthansa for allegedly discriminating against a large group of Orthodox Jewish passengers attempting to board a flight in Frankfurt to Budapest in May 2022.

Key Facts

The fine comes more than two years after the DOT received dozens of complaints following an incident with passengers attempting to travel on the German airline from New York City to Budapest—with a connecting flight in Germany.

The route had 128 passengers clad in distinctive garb typically worn by Orthodox Jewish men, the DOT said, who had made the flight from New York to Frankfurt and were waiting to board their connection to Hungary, when they were told they would not be allowed onto the plane because members of their group had violated the airline's masking policy.

Video from the incident showed Lufthansa staff telling passengers that everyone who was "Jewish coming from JFK" would have to pay for the mistakes of the passengers violating the policy—despite many of them not knowing each other and not traveling together.

Lufthansa apologized at the time and by December 2022 said it had reached a settlement with most members of the group.

The airline said in a statement to Forbes Tuesday that it fully cooperated with the DOT's review and partnered with the American Jewish Committee to create a training program for its managers and employees to address antisemitism and discrimination.

At the time of the incident, the Biden administration called it “classic antisemitism” and Deborah Lipstadt, the federal government's special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism, said it carried the "terrible, awful irony of it coming from the German national airline."

Key Background

Lufthansa isn’t the first airline to face civil rights penalties, but it’s not an overly common practice. In January of 2020, Delta Air Lines was fined $50,000 after the agency found the airline discriminated against three Muslim passengers on two separate occasions in 2016, both of which involved removing passengers from their seats after flight attendants and fellow passengers became nervous about their behavior. United Airlines was fined $305,000 in 2022 for allegedly discriminating against a Buddhist pilot. The DOT has Issued more than $170 million in penalties against airlines for consumer protection violations since President Biden took office in 2021.

Further Reading