Jordanian airport officials refused to let an Israeli rabbi board a plane out of Amman until they removed the straps from his tefillin, which they said was necessary for security reasons.
Rabbi Moshe Haliva, who was catching a connecting flight Monday on his trip from Tel Aviv to Dubai, said as a security guard sliced through leather straps, he had flashbacks of how the Nazis carried out the Holocaust. Jews were humiliated during
“It reminded me of the Nazis’ photos of the massacre, in which the peyote was cut [sidelocks] And Jews have beards,” Haliva told The Times of Israel on Tuesday. “It was quite sad.”
Haliva, originally from England, now lives in Israel with his family, while also serving as the head of a Sephardic community in Dubai.
He took a Royal Jordanian Airlines flight from Tel Aviv, landing at Queen Alia International Airport in Amman. From there he had to catch another RJA plane to Dubai in the United Arab Emirates, where he led a small community center for about a year.
Since he was traveling light, he only had his hand luggage which consisted of two sets of tefillin. When he reached the security desk, a guard asked him what the religious items were for. Tefillin, which come as a set of two, are small black boxes containing parchment with handwritten passages from the Torah and leather straps used to wrap them around the head and arm during prayer. They are considered the second most sacred object in Orthodox Judaism, after the Torah scrolls.
“This guy wanted to check my bags for whatever reason,” said Haliwa, who made the same trip in the opposite direction last week without incident. “They wanted to play the power game.”
Haliva said that he interpreted the purpose of tefillin as one for the mind, one for the heart, in which prayer to God is made. He said he noted that Jews and Muslims are cousins, and pray to the same God, but to no avail. The security guard manager insisted that he could not bring his tefillin on the plane because the straps were a security risk.
Haliva said he believes all international airport employees are familiar with common religious items from different religions, including tefillin. The guard wanted him to leave the items behind, “To me, it was a sign of antisemitism,” he said.
Haliva soon found himself surrounded by six security guards and instructed to proceed or face arrest, leaving the tefillin behind. Not wanting to give up the sacred objects – “who knows what would have happened to them” – he made a drastic decision and offered the guards to cut the straps so that he could at least take the more valuable boxes with him. Without the bandages, tefillin cannot be used for prayer but can be repaired. The guard refused and insisted that he leave behind all the tefillin.
Not willing to give up, Haliva sought out more senior security management and was eventually able to convince a director to let him take the boxes with him. Together, they returned to the security counter and there, the guards cut off the leather straps.
“It was humiliating, it was painful,” he said.
Haliva now wants to warn people about the dangers of traveling through Jordan.
“I won’t do it again,” he said.
After arriving at his final destination, he spoke with Liron Zaslansky, Israel’s consul in the United Arab Emirates, who told him that he was aware of incidents of antisemitic harassment by Jordanian border guards at the land crossing between Israel and Jordan.
