A teenage passenger using Jewish ritual items for prayer prompted a plane’s captain to call the bomb squad and divert a Kentucky-bound plane to Philadelphia on Thursday, Reuters reports.
A 17-year-old boy on US Airways Flight 3079 from New York to Louisville was using phylacteries (in Hebrew, tefillin), which are a pair of small black boxes that hold parchments inscribed with biblical passages that, using attached leather straps, observant men strap to their heads and arm as a part of daily morning prayer, as Deuteronomy 6:8 instructs, “Tie them [these commandments] as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads.”
A passenger saw the boy using the tefillin, mistook them for some sort of device or bomb, and became alarmed.
The plane landed without incident, the passengers and crew were taken off the plane, and no one was arrested or charged with any crime, a spokesman for US Airways said.
Jewish traditions calls for observant men to prayer three times daily in quorums of 10; tefillin are used only during the morning service. This can be problematic during long flights, when men have need to pray in a quorum, but little space to do so. After security was tightened following 9/11 and other plane-related terror incidents, many rabbinic authorities have stated that Jewish men should avoid congregating in quorums on planes — both out of common courtesy for other passengers and out of respect for the airlines’ security measures.
The boy was likely praying in his seat, but nonetheless alarmed a fellow passenger. Apparently, there was no one in the flight crew who was familiar with the items — unusual considering that the flight originated in New York, where thousands of observant Jews fly daily.
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