DETROIT — Four hours after last week’s historic pro-Israel march in Washington, DC ended, Jennie Levy had expected to be touching down back in Detroit, after a long but fulfilling day standing shoulder to shoulder with Jews from around the country in support of Israel.
Instead, her delegation of 900, organized by the Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Detroit, was hungry, disappointed and nowhere close to home.
Many members had missed most if not all of the rally because of what the federation said was a “malicious walk-off of drivers” hired to ferry them between the airport and National Mall.
Now, their return flight was delayed as a result, too.
“The buses that were hired to take over 900 participants from Dulles International Airport to the site of the march failed to appear, delaying the arrival of many in our group,” read a statement from the Detroit federation circulated by JFNA.
“We have learned that this was caused by a deliberate and malicious walk-off of drivers.”
The incident was a rare blemish on an otherwise successful day for the march and its attendees.
Organizers estimate 290,000 people turned out, making the march one of the biggest Jewish gatherings in American history, with people successfully making the trip from all over the country.
The malicious bus driver walk-off snafu stood such that it was mentioned during the rally itself.
William Daroff, the executive director of the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations and one of the organizers of the event, said on stage that “anti-Semitic bus drivers refused to drive participants to the rally.”
Daroff added that the federation told him the bus company had promised to take action against the drivers.
Levy, who works at a hospital and whose husband is Israeli, woke up at 6 a.m. on Nov. 14 for a flight chartered by the Detroit federation.
She traveled with a friend for the rally because she thought it was important for the Detroit Jewish community to “be there in full force.”
The three planes chartered by the federation landed at Dulles International Airport at around 11 a.m., leaving time for the delegation to board buses and make the 26-mile drive to the National Mall by the rally’s start time of 1 p.m.
But around a third of the buses never showed.
Two hours went by, with the three planes stranded on the Dulles tarmac. Because the flights were privately chartered and the passengers did not pass through a TSA checkpoint before boarding, they were not permitted inside the airport.
Then news started to trickle out from federation staff who told the people on board that drivers from the bus company the federation had hired were staging a “sickout.”
Workers call out sick as a form of protest — or as Levy put it, they “refused to drive Jews to the rally.”
The federation said it was “deeply dismayed by this disgraceful action,” but noted that not all Detroit attendees were affected.
“Fortunately, many were able to travel to the march and we are grateful to the drivers of those buses that arrived,” it said.
Dennis Bernard, a former head of the Detroit federation and the chair of JFNA’s security and anti-Semitism committee, was aboard one of the planes and read the statement aloud to the other passengers. A video showed Bernard speaking into the plane’s public address system, and saying, “unfortunately this falls right in my lap,” before presenting the statement as “official talking points.”
The video cuts off before Bernard shares additional information that he had said was confidential.
Once things were delayed, organizers were stressed and scrambling to devise a backup plan, Levy said.
After around two hours, the delegation’s organizers had arranged for makeshift shuttles, which allowed many of the 900 people to make it to the rally, though one full plane’s worth of people didn’t get to the event at all.
Mark Miller, the senior rabbi at Temple Beth El in the Detroit suburb of Bloomfield Hills, said he arrived at the rally around 2:30 p.m., and Levy said she got there at 3 p.m. That was when the event was scheduled to end, though it ran until closer to 4 p.m.
Then because of the unexpected delay in the morning, Levy said the plane’s crew had “timed out,” or exceeded federally mandated work limits, and was not allowed to begin the route back to Detroit until 2:30 a.m. — leaving the delegation waiting for several hours outside the airport.
Some in the group hadn’t eaten all day.
“We can’t pretend it’s not real, this anti-Semitism,” Miller said. He added, “On a day like today, where we had a large and enthusiastic group who was proud to be there . . . for this to be the reason we couldn’t get there just speaks to the reality of what is happening all around us, that anti-Semitism is real.”
Miller said that while the main focus of the day should still be the rally and its enormous turnout, “we would be remiss not to have this [incident with the buses] as part of the story of today, too.”
For Levy, the incident offered a stark reminder of why she had decided to travel to Washington in the first place.
“The Jewish community in the US already feels very helpless and sad about everything going on,” Levy told JTA. “I’m scared too, to know that anti-Semitism is so close to me.”
