This is not the first year that a story has been circulating on the Internet about a woman who, desperate to wait for silence on board the Tel Aviv-Verona flight, took an extreme step. We checked how credible this story is.

Here’s what one version of the widely circulated text looks like: “An Israeli airline plane is flying from Tel Aviv to Verona. Of the 160 passengers, about 120 are religious Jews, clearly Sephardic, with numerous children. Children are rushing around the plane, their mothers and fathers are yelling at the children and shouting at each other. In short, the camp has already gone into the sky. The remaining passengers turn to the crew in despair, but the crew is helpless:

“A plane is not like a bus; you can’t stop it at the side of the road and you can’t turn out hooligans.”

Several pairs of young Israelis sit in the front rows. Desperate to sleep or even rest, one of them, a woman in her 30s, stands in the aisle and slowly takes off her blouse, and then her bra. All the religious immediately became quiet, covering their eyes—theirs and their children’s. In the ensuing silence, the young woman speaks loudly:

- If there is no silence on the plane, I will take off my panties too...

Her friends promise to do the same. Before Verona, there was deathly silence in the cabin.

For her resourcefulness and civic courage, which solved the problem of the aircraft’s stability in the air, the company’s management, upon arrival in Verona, presented this brave woman with a free ticket to Rome, including a free week’s stay at the Grand Hotel.”

This story found a wide response on social networks. For example, the corresponding publication on Facebook in November 2021 generated more than 40,000 shares. The story's popularity soared and in previous years, including on the website anekdot.ru.

The story itself contains very few details, which is why it can indeed be perceived as an anecdote, especially taking into account the unusual action of the plane passenger. However, the comments of many users indicate that their authors fully believe in the reality of the events described. Moreover, sometimes there are messages on a similar topic in the news. For example, in 2021 the airline EasyJet paid compensation for an airline passenger who was asked to change seats twice in one year after requests from Orthodox Jews seated in the same row. Happened and so that the latter preferred to leave the plane before takeoff, when their request did not find understanding among the passengers.

A simple search shows that the story in question first appeared on the Internet in 2013 - first in Facebook (August 11), and then in "LiveJournal"(August 24). The owner of both accounts is journalist, guide and historian of Tel Aviv Boris Brestovitsky. His publication reports that what is described is a real-life incident. At the same time, the differences from the viral version are striking: the passenger’s speech is conveyed in an indirect form, her threat mentions pants, not underpants, and the last paragraph about the airline’s award is completely absent. The author's version looks more realistic, because the Israeli airline has nothing to do with hotels in Rome. And the passenger did not save her from any disaster: the noise and commotion on board is a fairly standard situation that many air passengers encounter.

We contacted the author, and he assured us that this incident, down to the smallest details, happened before his eyes. It was in June 2013, when he went on a trip from Tel Aviv to Verona on a company overnight flight Israir. It is easy to verify that the specified company actually had flight to the homeland of Romeo and Juliet. Moreover, in the same July the author’s LiveJournal appeared post with photos from Italy (though already from Rome). According to Brestovitsky, the brave passenger and her friend were sitting in the first row, and he himself was in the third or fourth. The plane was small, without division into classes. As for the begging question about the reaction of the airliner’s security service, Brestovitsky gave the answer to it in the comments to his post: while the steward was walking towards the woman, she managed to get dressed and sit down in her seat. The steward tried to reprimand her, but a man from the next row told him that all the passengers had asked the crew several times to restore order to no avail. The steward retreated.

Boris Brestovitsky noted that with his post he did not intend to condemn the behavior Sephardi-Haredi - this is their culture and their traditions. Judging by comments, such cases when Sephardim meet representatives of other cultures are not uncommon. Well, the publication, as we already know, after its appearance took on a separate life - it multiplied on many sites and turned into an anecdote with a fictitious ending about a reward from the airline and fake illustrations. However, this story has a specific author, and facts that would contradict his words are currently unknown.