Due To Haredi Pressure, Passengers Trapped In Planes While Corpses Brought To Israel For Burial Are Unloaded

Haredim worried about "impurity" force hundreds of passengers to wait on plane without air conditioning.

Airlines: Stop 'impurity of Kohanim' procedure
Following haredi pressure, Ben-Gurion Airport keeps arriving passengers in planes which land in Israel with a body in their cargo areas, until corpse is removed. Airlines demand a different solution, saying 'torture of passengers must end'
Arie Egozi • Ynet

A number of airlines demanded last week that the Israel Airports Authority (IAA) stop the "impurity of Kohanim" procedure. According to this procedure, if a plane landing at Ben-Gurion Airport is 
carrying in its cargo area a body flown in from abroad, its passengers can only get off the plane after the body is removed from the aircraft, even if it takes a long time.

This procedure was adopted by Ben-Gurion Airport following pressure by haredi elements, in order to prevent the impurity of people waiting inside the terminal.

"The torture of passengers must end," a source in the aviation industry said Wednesday.

About two weeks ago, passengers of a Swiss International Airlines plane were forced to wait on the hot aircraft with no air conditions for about half an hour for the removal of a body located far from the cargo area's entrance.

After the plane landed, its doors did not open and the air conditioning systems did not work. Some 200 passengers and crew members were left on the closed plane, and their protest was unanswered. Only after the corpse was removed from the plane, 30 minutes after landing, a boarding bridge was connected to the aircraft and the angry passengers were allowed to get off.

"This country is doing everything possible to drive tourists away. All kinds of strange procedures are doing the job more than any security situation," a source at Ben-Gurion Airport had said at the time.

Following the incident, airlines are demanding a permanent solution for the problem. "It's unthinkable that passengers should be tortured because of an agreement between the IAA and rabbis," said a source in the aviation industry. "They want a quiet front on the part of religious elements. That's important, obviously – but the passengers are important too."

[Hat Tip: Joel Katz.]

Comments

[seymour]

This procedure was adopted by Ben-Gurion Airport following pressure by haredi elements, in order to prevent the impurity of people waiting inside the terminal.

i do not get how does this solve the problem

[Robert Wisler]

What has to happen in order for Israel to survive is to get a non-orthodox voting bloc together and throw the hareidi sons-of-bitches (and they truly are) out of the government. Then this insanity will end

[effie]

Unfortunately, Israel is sounding more and more like those crazy fundamentalist muslim countries.

[PishPosh]

I would think that passengers should be told prior to boarding the plane that they might be subject to such wait times and that a lawsuit against Ben Gurion airport may start a chain reaction in a positive direction.

[steve]

Simple solution: let everyone deplane and allow the kohanim to stay on board until the corpse has left the terminal.

[itchiemayer]

Steve - That's a pretty darned sensible solution. As a Kohen, I'm stuck on the plane, but it's better than keeping everyone on.

[Yochanan Lavie]

Seething on a Jet Plane (apologies to Bob Denver)

All my bags are packed
I'm ready to go
I'm sittin' here inside the plane
I hate to wake the dead to say goodbye
But the dawn is breakin'
It's early morn
Cohanim are waitin'
Blowing shofar horns
Already I'm so impatient
I could die

chorus:
So curse me and sigh for me
Tell me that you'll pray for me
Get the body off the plane, just let 'em go
'cause I'm waiting on a jet plane
Don't know when I'll be off again
Oh bubbeleh, I wanna go

There's so many times I've flown El Al
So many times I've prayed around
I tell you now, schedules don't mean a thing
Ev'ry place I go, I'll think of Jews
Ev'ry tchinek I've hocked, I'll hock for you,
When I come back, I'll go to a fabringen

chorus

Now the time has come to deplane the corpse
One more time
Let me curse you
Then close his eyes
He'll be on his way
Dream about the World to come
When we won't have to die at all
About those times, I won't have to say

chorus

But, I'm waiting for a dead guy
Don't know when the Rebbe be back again
Oh bubbeleh, I wanna go

[Dr. Dave]

Welcome back YL!!!

[Yochanan Lavie]

Thanks, Dr. Dave.

[Isa]

I think that if the jet way was connected to the plane - then the whole terminal 'has' dead body within it

[effie]

The dead won't hurt you.

[Isa]

No, the dead will not hurt you
But FROM my old learning
My guess is a Kohen cannot be in a building that has a dead person within.
My guess is that a dead body is taken to a totally separate building

There is a simple way to solve this...
Just have the airline refuse transporting a dead body anymore

For an evil person it will not matter where one is buried...
This holds true for a righteous person too.

[WoolSilkCotton]

If a Kohen is on the plane, and the dead body is in the cargo space of that plane, isn't it like the Kohen is in a 'building' with a dead body?

[Robert Wisler]

Yochanan,
Although I appreciate the song parody very much, the author of the original was JOHN Denver, not BOB Denver. Bob Denver was the star of Gilligan's Island and The Dobie Gillis Show. John Denver was the famed songwriter and folk musician.

B. Wisler

[effie]

Obviously, Kohens were meant to stay away from planes and airports and they should never fly.

[Neo-Conservaguy]

My guess is a Kohen cannot be in a building that has a dead person within.

You mean, like a hospital? How about all those cemeteries those planes flew over? Or, as already pointed out, how about that dead body in the cargo hold? Face it, this is a stupid game in the face of the fact that every Jew alive is probably tamei hamet. The most idiotic experience I've seen with this game was when a young boy (a "kohen") at a day school my kids attended was bundled up and thrown out of the school into the parking lot during winter because a funeral was being held at the shul connected to the school. The boy's parents both worked far away and the nanny/sitter took half an hour to get to the school to rescue the kid from the insanity.

[Mr. Apikoros]

How about throwing the stiffs out of the plane in mid-air? I'm not referring to the dead bodies here.

[Dr. Dave]

How about starting AKA - all kohen airlines.

No corpses and they serve Terumah in first class.

Flight attendent will be leviim to hand out those little wet towels for the kohanim to wash their hands.

[effie]

Are Kohens exempt from the army? Or, are they only exempt when there are hostilities?

[Office of the Chief Rabbi]

Brilliant, YL. I could envison Maynard G. Krebs bongoing to that tune.

[effie]

Brilliant, YL. I could envison Maynard G. Krebs bongoing to that tune.

Work!

[Shmarya]

Brilliant, YL. I could envison Maynard G. Krebs bongoing to that tune.

Character named after my uncle Maynard (my mother's sister's husband) by Max Schulman because Maynard got the girl and he did not.

[maven]

Oh, if only the Gra was around today. He did not believe that today's kohanim were actually kohanim. Unfortunately, all the pseudoscientists like to support the continued presence of the priestly "genome", so this stuff continues. And they get out of gross anatomy, as Dr Dave can attest.

[Yochanan Lavie]

Robert (not John) Wisler: my bad.

[effie]

How does one avoid flying over a cemetery when one flies into JFK?

[Yakira]

I gues common sense is really not that common.

[Levi Keller]

Actually the CMH (cohen modalic halotype) is not unique to Cohanim, but rather a trait that is extraordinarily common among them - up to 90 percent.

The chances that the founder of the caste had a significant mutation of this sort would be very slim. In addition to cohanim, the CMH is distributed among Magyar and Caucasian (as in Caucasus dwelling - not 'white') populations among others - including all the Samaritans

[flailed]

what am i missing? why can't they let all the passengers off, and then remove the baggage leaving the aron for last? or put the aron near the door so it can be removed first? actually, i really don't get it? don't passengers walk off through a boarding bridge, while luggage is removed below? at what point of deplaning are passengers nearer to the luggage than they were throughout the flight?

[Gladys P.]

Wisler: "What has to happen in order for Israel to survive is to get a non-orthodox voting bloc together and throw the hareidi sons-of-bitches (and they truly are) out of the government. Then this insanity will end"

Nope. What Jews have to do to reclaim the Homeland of ALL the Jews is start having babies rather than aborting them, stop mongrelizing with shiksas and make Aliyah. Demographics is destiny. You have to Redeem the Land from the Haredim by actually making your own little settlers. You can't run the Haredim off like the Arabs in 1948. Stop sucking up to the goyim. Make Aliyah. Make it THIS year in Jerusalem.