A border control officer at Vaclav Havel Airport in Prague forced an Orthodox Jewish woman last week to remove her head covering in front of a large number of travelers, in what is being widely viewed as a serious case of antisemitism.
The woman, traveling with her husband from Prague to London, was scheduled to depart on a Ryanair flight at 6 a.m. Monday morning. The incident took place at 4 a.m. The woman’s husband carried a European Union passport and was sent to the EU line, where he was processed without incident. The woman, holding only a British passport, was sent to the non-EU line, where the confrontation occurred.
An airport border official ordered her to remove her head covering. She explained that her Orthodox Jewish restrictions proscribed her from uncovering her hair, but he yelled at her so aggressively that she feared arrest and complied.
“First he told me to take my hand out of my pocket,” she said in an interview. “Then he yelled that I was leaning on his table. ‘That’s not allowed.’ Then he looked at my passport and told me to take off my head covering. I told him I’m not allowed to, and he said to me, ‘Take it off.’ So I told him I’m a religious Jew and I can’t take it off.”
“He yelled again, ‘Take it off,’” the woman continued. “I was so afraid they would arrest me that I just took it off. He said it was fine and let me through. I told him that what he made me do was demoralizing. He looked at me coldly and didn’t say a word. He just ignored me.”
In the Czech Republic, where Prague is the capital, the rate of antisemitic incidents exploded following the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel, with reported cases soaring by 90 percent over the previous year.
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