The newspaper headlines read:

"Oy Vey!  Flight Diverted After Confusion Over Prayer"

"The Power of Prayer:  Flight Diverted Because of Tefillin"

"Teen Couldn't Convince Flight Crew His Tefillin was Harmless"

"Misinterpreted Jewish Ritual Causes Stir on Jet"

"Good Grief!  Tefillin Cause New York - Louisville Flight to Be Diverted"

There's a Yiddish expression, "Fun itlechen hoiz trogt men epes arois."  (If you mix around, you learn quite a bit.)  This statement did not hold true recently when the flight attendant on a US Airways Express, Flight 32079, didn't recognize tefillin, the small leather boxes attached to leather straps that observant Jews wear during morning prayer.

The female flight attendant saw a 17-year- old male passenger wrapping what appeared to be cables or wires to his head. She said it had wires running from it and going up to his fingers.  She notified "der pilot" and the Kentucky-bound plane was diverted to Philadelphia.  A  visit from a bomb squad followed.

The flight attendant was no "dumkop" (dumbbell)!  She simply had never seen this ritual.  Tefillin have been used for thousands of years.  Benjamin Blech, an assistant professor of Talmud at Yeshiva University in New York, said he found the incident "both humorous and outlandish" and called it a "wake-up call" for religious sensitivity.  "We should be awre of ignorance just as much as we should be aware of terrorism," he said.

FYI, Agudath Israel of America has reached out to airlines in America and throughout "di velt" (the world) to promote a greater understanding of Jewish prayer rituals. Rabbi A. D. Motzen said, "To facilitate training and awareness, we recently created a brochure explaining Orthodox customs for individual airlines."  And Rabbi Mark Kalish said, "we have also cautioned members of our own community that they must understand that many citizens may not be familiar with Jewish prayer rituals, and that they should explain the practice to individuals in authority BEFORE boarding planes, buses, trains, and other forms of public transit."

In an e-mail from Rabbi Marc Wilson [Jan. 24, 2010], he wrote:
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"First and foremost, the incident is a tragic commentary on living in such a meshuganer velt.  In the context of this kind of a world, suspicion of an older teenager donning weird boxes strapped on by 'wires,' could be cause for concern, as sad as I am to say. (Ironically, I remember once leigen tefillin on a flight from San Francisco to Kennedy when I was 17!  I got some odd looks, but no fear of subversion.)

Should the flight attendants be aware of such arcane customs, regardless of how unimportant they are to a minority-of-a- minority of Americans and even American Jews?  In the best of circumstances, of course.  But, how could security training plug every little hole in the question of every weird suspicion?  Confidentially, the hollow of the arm tefillin would be a perfect place for secreting a powerful explosive. God forbid.

And then there's the bugaboo of political correctness.  A Muslim legitimately chants Allahu Akbar and all hell breaks loose.  No so for those suspicious 'explosive filled' boxes wrapped around a Jewish teenager?

What to do from our end?  The flight attendant should have been alerted by the young man when boarding the plan, even shown the tefillin.  Then it could be the flight attendant's decision to allow such a suspicious act, or not.  If s/he would not allow it, he should have been asked off the plane right then.  I'd rather deal with a little ruckus and a hassle from the ADL than a diverted flight.

Better yet, I am wondering why the issue was not moot to begin with.  The flight from LGA to Louisville is an hour or less. According to strictest opinion in halacha, the window of opportunity to leig tefillin is significantly more than a hour.  Thus, there should be no scenario in which the young man HAD to leig tefillin on the airplane, for an hour earlier he could have davened in LGA in his tefillin, and an hour later in the airport in Louisville.

Saddest of all is how much cyber-ink I had to use to deal with such a pathetic issue. The simple answer is, "Yidden, use your seichel!"

Fondly,
Marc Wilson
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And, finally, Rabbi Anchelle Perl (Chabad of Mineola) sent me a humorous piece titled, "Rabbi Perl Announces The New Tefillin In-Air Rules":

THE ANSWER after the standard demonstration on how an airline life jacket works, an airline officer will proceed to show how to put on tefillin.  Furthermore, the travelling public is reassured with the following immediate changes:

TSA = Tefillin Security Administration           
            f/k/a Transportation Security
           Administration

FTC = Federal Tefillin Commission
          f/k/a Federal Trade Commission

TNT = Tefillin Never Terminates
            f/k/a/ Trinitrotoluene abbreviated
            TNT

EBT = Examination Before Tefillin
           f/k/a/ Examination Before Trial

TP   = Tefillin Profiling
           f/k/a/The TeePee tent)

TKO = Tefillin Knock Out
            f/k/a/ Technical Knock Out

"A dank" to both Rabbis, Marc Wilson and Anchelle Perl for this "vunderlekh" assistance in writing this piece.