A rabbi of a Sephardi Jewish community in the United Arab Emirates was banned from boarding his flight in the Jordanian capital Amman with tefillin, religious items consisting of small boxes containing excerpts from the Torah that are bound around the upper arm and forehead, until airport officials cut off their leather straps.
British-born Rabbi Moshe Haliwa was flying home from Tel Aviv to Dubai via Jordan this week when he was stopped at Amman airport and denied boarding for his connecting flight until the airport officials sliced through the leather straps that are used to hold the tefillin in place.
Haliwa told the Jerusalem Post that his two pairs of tefillin were spotted by the security guard inspecting his hand luggage, who then called over some other security officials as they tried to understand what they were seeing.
“I explained what they were, a religious artifact, but they didn’t speak English very well. I explained that it is all made of leather,” he said.
The head of security deemed the leather straps a risk and initially would not let Haliwa board with the tefillin at all. It was only the intervention of another senior airport official that resulted in the compromise of severing the leather straps.
“They took scissors and cut it all off,” the rabbi told the Post. “I thought of [Nazis in the Holocaust] cutting beards and side locks. At least they gave me back the boxes themselves.”
Haliwa said he wants more people to be aware of the potential consequences of traveling through Jordan with religious items.