You probably heard about the tefillin scare yesterday on a US Airways flight from New York to Louisville. Seventeen-year-old Caleb Leibowitz was laying tefillin, when a panicked flight attendant alerted the flight crew that something was amiss, and the plane was diverted to Philadelphia.
Of course, the young pious Jew had no explosives in his phylacteries — which a Philadelphia police spokesman called an “olfactory” — and the whole thing was a misunderstanding.
The New York Times reported on the scenario:
The pilot decided to divert the Kentucky-bound plane to Philadelphia. In less than 30 minutes it was on the ground, police officers were swarming through the passenger cabin, and the Transportation Security Administration was using terms like “disruptive passenger” and “suspicious passenger” to describe the boy.
An hour or so after that, Lt. Frank Vanore, a spokesman for the Philadelphia police, had another explanation.
“It was unfamiliarity that caused this,” he said.
He said the flight crew had never seen tefillin, small leather boxes attached to leather straps that observant Jews wear during morning prayers. The flight crew “didn’t understand what it was,” he said, and the pilot “erred on the side of caution and decided to radio that in and to divert the flight.”
Comedian Joel Chasnoff — who will perform Feb. 25 at the Sabes JCC in St. Louis Park, as part of the Minneapolis Jewish Humor Festival — has had some experience with “Flying While Jewish,” as he explains here:
Finally, here’s a tutorial on putting on tefillin, courtesy of Tzvi, who’s with Chabad of Dallas:
