52 Jewish kids kicked off plane in Spain for singing in Hebrew

More than 50 French Jewish youths were removed from a Vueling flight in Valencia, Spain, on Wednesday, allegedly following their singing in Hebrew.

Vueling claimed that the teenagers were being “disruptive.”

Amichai Chikli, Israel’s minister for Diaspora affairs and combating antisemitism, accused the Spanish airline in a post on X of being responsible for “one of the most serious … severe antisemitic incidents [seen] recently.”

Chikli was commenting on a video that shows a young woman lying face down on what appears to be a boarding bridge, as one Spanish police officer handcuffs her and another instructs the person filming to move away.

Chikli identified the woman as an instructor of the Kineret Club, a summer camp operated for Jewish families by the Matana charitable association.

The i24 News television channel reported that the members of the group of 52 youths were aged 13-15. For that age group, Kineret Club arranged a summer camp that ended on Wednesday in Sant Carlès de la Rapita, a coastal resort city situated between Valencia and Barcelona.

Vueling in a statement on X said that the teenagers were taken off the flight due to “highly disruptive behavior,” claiming members of the group “mishandled emergency equipment” and so the crew decided to have the group disembark “to prioritize the safety of the rest of the passengers.”

At Vueling, “we categorically reject any form of discrimination without exception,” the statement read. It did not mention the claim that the youths were kicked off the flight for singing in Hebrew.

The statement did little to convince Vueling’s critics in connection with the incident.

“This is a shocking antisemitic incident of discrimination against minors,” Sacha Roytman, chief executive director of the Combat Antisemitism Movement (CAM), told JNS.

“It is outrageous that we have reached a situation where singing in Hebrew by teenagers constitutes grounds for removing them from a flight, using violence and unreasonable force, and demonstrating excessive hostility toward them—simply because they are Jews and Israelis,” said Roytman.

A mother of one of the vacationers, Karine Lamy, told i24 that the children sang in Hebrew in the airplane until the flight crew told them to stop and threatened to call the police if they persisted. The children stopped but the police arrested the instructor and told them to exit the airplane. Some of the children were still at the airport of Valencia on Wednesday evening, awaiting an alternative flight back to France, i24 reported.

Caroline Yadan, a French lawmaker who represents voters living in Israel and several other Mediterranean countries in the French National Assembly, wrote on X that if the reports about how Vueling handled the flight were accurate, the airline “should have to answer in court” for its “very serious” actions.

Enfoque Judio, a Spanish-Jewish news site, reported that according to some accounts, the instructor was arrested after she objected to the police’s demand that the students give up their phones.

The incident follows several cases in which Israelis were harassed, intimidated and even assaulted in Spain.

On July 8, Israeli tourists were chased out of a restaurant in the Spanish city of Vigo.

And last week a group of Israelis said they had been followed and intimidated outside their hotel near Barcelona.

A group of men had stalked the three Israeli tourists, who said they were threatened several times during their vacation until, at a certain encounter, the perpetrators, armed with sticks, chased the Israelis on the street in Lloret de Mar, the Israelis said. The tourists made it back to their hotel safely, Israel’s Channel 12 News reported.

Earlier this month, Spain’s Observatory against Antisemitism—an entity co-founded by the country’s Federation of Jewish Communities of Spain (FCJE)—published its annual report for 2024, in which it documented 193 antisemitic incidents—a record tally that constitutes a 321% increase over 2023 and an increase of 567% over 2022.

Most of these acts documented were linked to the war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, the report said.

© JNS