Guest Relations, Luton Airport: “Good afternoon. Thank you for contacting us and sharing your concerns regarding your recent experience at London Luton Airport. We are truly sorry to hear about the distress you experienced and the negative impact it had on your journey.
We have carefully reviewed your complaint and can confirm that our established procedures were not correctly followed in this instance. Ordinarily, all headwear, including baseball caps, must be removed and scanned in our central search area to ensure that they are not utilized to conceal prohibited items. Those checks are important to ensure the safety and security of all airport users.”
To take my grandsons Mendy and Tal to London, or not to take my grandsons Mendy and Tal to London: that was the question.
This would be my sixth London-with-English-Speaking Savta trip for my grandchildren of bar and bat mitzvah age, always taking two or three cousins who had reached the appropriate age.
This time, I had to balance intensified security warnings for Jews and Israelis traveling to England against the disappointment of canceling a long-awaited trip for Israeli children who have already had a lot of cancellations in their young lives.
In addition to my usual grandmotherly worries about crossing streets safely, I was concerned about avoiding hostile Uber drivers from countries unfriendly to my homeland, and about steering clear of demonstrations and danger. To solve the Uber problem, I googled drivers in Hebrew and found several Israeli transportation services, settling on the wonderful Moshe London Taxis.
As for security, one of my children suggested I bring along an additional grandson of army age. Instead, I promised we would stay within the tourist areas, speak only English in the street, fly El Al, and wear no outward signs of Jewish identity.
Still, that moment disembarking (deboarding) the plane, when I reminded Tal and Mendy to take off their kippot and tuck in their ritual fringes, made me wince.
We stayed in an apartment hotel with a kitchenette in Trafalgar Square, carrying our kosher food supplies. We made an adventure of going into a tourist shop to pick out matching hats and T-shirts. Disguises, really.
Then off we went to the major sites: the Tower of London, Tower Bridge, The View from The Shard, Shakespeare’s Globe, and so on. “Our Tower in Jerusalem is much older,” one grandson remarked at the Tower of London, not inaccurately.
Neither of these grandsons is a football fan, unlike their older siblings, whose wishes have taken me to London’s famous pitches. But one had read all the Harry Potter books, so we visited Warner Bros. Studio Tour London: The Making of Harry Potter. There, a guide asked us where we were from and then spoke to us in Hebrew.
The only time we left the purely tourist track for a Jewish site was for lunch after Madame Tussauds London, at the nearby rebuilt Reubens Deli & Restaurant. We did, however, choose the Hebrew headphones for the boys at the wonderful Churchill War Rooms.
When we were in line for the Crown Jewels, I remarked that they could hear every language from the tour guides nearby.
“Every language but one,” commented one grandson. “The Israelis are all speaking English.”
When I was with the boys, everything went flawlessly. I admit that when I left them briefly to go to the lobby alone to retrieve my morning coffee, and the “Where are you from?” questions were in the air, I always answered, “Jerusalem.”
“You must feel safe now that you are in London,” said a woman tourist from Northern Europe.
“Just the opposite,” I told her. “I’m in disguise. No signs of anything Jewish. Didn’t you hear that two Jews my age were stabbed recently in London?”
When a tourist from the Netherlands remarked that it was sad that so much of the world disliked Israelis “because of Netanyahu,” I reminded her, in my best neutral tones, that there were always excuses for antisemitism, as in her own country, where the Dutch themselves rounded up their Jews.
I was aware that I would not have engaged in these conversations if the boys had been with me.
With them, everything went so smoothly that when we ran into trouble at Luton Airport, I was taken by surprise. There, too, we were dressed in our London hats and shirts as we went through the security line before boarding. We had no souvenir pen knives or liquids in our possession.
Despite guidelines, security insisted on us taking off our hats
The imperious woman in charge insisted that we remove our hats. I gave my usual answer that has been satisfactory in all the many airports I’ve traveled through: we wear head coverings for religious reasons.
How could those London baseball hats be religious items?
I explained.
She mocked the explanation, saying something about how, if I were wearing a cowboy hat, I could claim that it was for religious reasons, too. And she would not let us through security unless the hats came off.
I do not remember the exact words, and I asked for the camera clip to share with you, dear readers. We all know that this top security agent would not have insisted that a woman remove a hijab, niqab, or burka.
I complained to the officer in charge, who shrugged it off and gave me the address of customer services.
“In this instance, our officer should have offered you and your grandsons the option of a private screening once you had indicated that you were wearing a baseball cap for religious reasons. We sincerely apologize to you and your grandsons for that error.
We have spoken with the officer concerned, who has offered a sincere apology. While this does not excuse the error, officers operate in a loud, fast-paced, and demanding environment while assisting thousands of passengers each day.
However, they are expected to respond appropriately whenever a passenger advises that an item of clothing is worn for religious reasons, even if that item would not typically be associated with religious observance.
To help avoid any future recurrence, we have taken the opportunity to reinforce to the officer and all teams the importance of communicating compassionately and carefully with our guests.
We would very much like to make sure you have a much better experience when you next visit our airport. As a goodwill gesture to you and your family, we would like to provide free fast-track security passes and car parking at the airport for your next trip, and also to arrange for a member of our guest experience team to meet with you to help with your journey through the airport.”
They are not willing to send me the footage of the incident, but they will show it to me if I want to come to Luton for the showing.
I do not think I will ever be traveling through Luton Airport again, not to park a car and not to arrive with Moshe, and certainly not wearing a cowboy hat. So if a barrister or a member of the Board of Deputies would like to serve as my representative for said showing, please be in touch.
The writer is the Israel director of public relations at Hadassah, the Women’s Zionist Organization of America. Her latest book is A Daughter of Many Mothers, co-written with Holocaust survivor and premier English-language witness Rena Quint.
