Day: July 3, 2024

WEST PALM BEACH, Florida — Nicole Lindsay thought she could beat the holiday-week travel rush by booking an early morning flight. It didn’t work out that way.

“I thought it wouldn’t be that busy, but it turned out to be quite busy,” the Baltimore resident said as she herded her three daughters through Palm Beach International Airport in Florida. “It was a lot of kids on the flight, so it was kind of noisy — a lot of crying babies.”

Lindsay said the flight was full, but her family arrived safely to spend a few days in Port Saint Lucie, so she was not complaining.

Airlines hope the outcome is just as good for millions of other passengers scheduled to take holiday flights over the next few days.

AAA forecasts that 70.9 million people will travel at least 80 kilometers from home over a nine-day stretch that began June 27, a 5% increase over the comparable period around the Fourth of July last year. Most of those people will drive, and the motor club says traffic will be the worst between 2 p.m. and 7 p.m. most days.

Federal officials expect air-travel records to fall as Americans turn the timing of July Fourth on a Thursday into a four-day — or longer — holiday weekend.

The Transportation Security Administration predicts that its officers will screen more than 3 million travelers at U.S. airports on Sunday. That would top the June 23 mark of more than 2.99 million. American Airlines said Sunday is expected to be its busiest day of the entire summer; it plans more than 6,500 flights.

TSA was created after the terror attacks on September 11, 2001, and replaced a collection of private security companies that were hired by airlines. Eight of the 10 busiest days in TSA’s history have come this year, as the number of travelers tops pre-pandemic levels.

The head of the agency, David Pekoske, said Wednesday that TSA has enough screeners to handle the expected crowds this weekend and through the summer.

“We have been totally tested over the course of the last couple of months in being able to meet our wait-time standards of 10 minutes for a PreCheck passenger and 30 minutes for a standard passenger, so we are ready,” Pekoske said on NBC’s Today show.

Peggy Grundstrom, a frequent traveler from Massachusetts who flew to Florida to visit her daughter and granddaughter, said the line for security in Hartford, Connecticut, was unusually long.

“It was busier than I have personally seen in the past,” Grundstrom said. “But, you know, I prefer to fly unless it’s very local. I’m at a stage where I don’t want to travel in a car for long periods of time.”

Polls consistently show that a high percentage of Americans think the economy is poor, but that is not stopping them from traveling this summer.

“My finances are always pretty tight,” said Madison Tilner, a law-school student at Northwestern University who was waiting for a flight at O’Hare International Airport in Chicago. But with a work life looming ahead of her, she said, “I’m trying to travel more and use my free time while I can. I think a lot of people feel that way in summer.”

Passengers on about 3,000 flights Wednesday were spending some of their free time hanging around airports because of flight delays, according to FlightAware.

(JTA) — Israel’s two chief rabbis stepped down from their posts this week, leaving the positions officially vacant for the first time in more than a century as the government has failed to set a date for their successors’ election.

Two rabbis have stepped in to fulfill the jobs’ duties on an interim basis,  but who the next Ashkenazi and Sephardi chief rabbis will be — and when they will be chosen — remains unclear. The two outgoing rabbis, Ashkenazi David Lau and Sephardi Yitzhak Yosef, were elected in 2013 to a 10-year term by a body of approximately 150 people.

The chief rabbis sit atop the vast bureaucracy of the haredi Orthodox-controlled Israeli Chief Rabbinate, which manages broad swaths of religious life in Israel including marriage, burial and conversion. The chief rabbis hold little power on their own over the day-to-day operations of the Chief Rabbinate, which is run by a council, but they traditionally command significant influence in Israeli public religious discourse.

“At this hour the term of the chief rabbis is ending,” Michael Malkieli, Israel’s religious affairs minister, posted on X on Monday. “It was a term full of complex challenges, during which they led the citizens of Israel with bravery and courage.”

What Malkieli’s post did not include was a date for a new election. A scheduling conflict and concerns regarding the makeup of the voting body mean that his ministry has repeatedly postponed a vote that was supposed to take place last year.

First, the rabbinate election clashed with Israel’s local elections. But the date was then pushed off again because of two rulings from Israel’s Supreme Court: Both Lau and Yosef come from rabbinic dynasties and the court ruled that, because both have brothers running for their posts, the chief rabbis couldn’t have a hand in choosing members of the body that votes for their successors. The second ruling instructed them to “consider” appointing more women to the voting body.

Now, multiple petitions to the Supreme Court are demanding that the court order the government to immediately schedule elections, which by law were supposed to have happened already. One petitioner is Itim, an organization that helps Israelis navigate the rabbinate’s bureaucracy and advocates for better governance in the body.

“At present the Chief Rabbinate has power and needs to be transparent,” Rabbi Seth Farber, Itim’s founder, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “Right now they are violating the law by not having elections.”

Using a Yiddishism meaning “craziness,” he added, “We want to stop this mishagaas once and for all. If the new rabbinate is not willing to work with us, we will work hard to limit their powers.”

There have been attempts at changing the Chief Rabbinate via elections in the past. In the last election in 2013, a reformist candidate, religious Zionist Rabbi David Stav, ran a high-profile campaign but fell short. This year, relatives of David and Yosef, both of whose fathers also served as chief rabbis, hope to keep the positions in the families.

Criticism of the Chief Rabbinate is widespread among Israeli Jews — spanning secular Jews who chafe at its religious restrictions and haredi Jews who want it to be more stringent or who blanch at its affiliation with the Israeli government.

According to a survey conducted in May by the Israel Democracy Institute, just 44% of Israeli Jews say they “accept the Chief Rabbinate of Israel as a religious or spiritual authority.” That includes 66% of haredi respondents and just 17% of secular Jews. The rabbinate’s highest rating, 78%, came from religious Zionists.

The post Israel without a chief rabbi for first time in a century appeared first on The Forward.

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