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Toronto woman says Uber driver refused to take her home after she spoke Hebrew
A Toronto woman says her luggage was tossed out of a vehicle by an Uber driver when he heard her speaking Hebrew to her husband. The driver then refused to take them home from the airport after they arrived from a trip in the middle of the night in February.
Shiri Gabriel’s snub at Toronto Pearson airport brings the number of antisemitic acts involving the rideshare company and Torontonians to three. In August, David Woolf, 78, who splits his time between Toronto and Israel, said an Uber driver in Europe refused to take him, his wife and their friends to a train station, because he said he was from Israel. Toronto model Miriam Mattova recently told National Post she was kicked out of a vehicle in the middle of the night last month after the driver heard her speaking about Israel. The driver told her “they do not drive Jewish people,” she told the Post.
Gabriel, 52, was born in Peru, moved to Israel in her teens and then later to Canada. She said her husband ordered an Uber through the app on Feb. 11 after returning to Toronto from Florida. When the vehicle arrived, her husband started putting luggage in the trunk while the male driver sat inside the vehicle. Gabriel waited in the back seat to keep warm.
As her husband was finishing up with the luggage, she said something to him in Hebrew.
“Then the Uber driver turns to me and says, ‘Get out! Get out!'” she told National Post. “He gets out of the car, literally takes our suitcases and throws them on the road, all of them.”
The driver wouldn’t tell the couple why he refused to take them, but Gabriel said it was “clearly an antisemitic act.”
Through her husband’s Uber account, they reported the incident. Uber responded via email the following day and said the behaviour they described was “completely unacceptable and not tolerated” on the platform. The company refunded them $5 in Uber Cash, and said they would not be matched with the driver again.
“It felt like a punch in the gut, like literally a slap in the face. I’m telling you this whole story, I’m writing an email about what clearly is an antisemitic act… and all you have to say is (here’s) $5,” she said. “No repercussions, nothing…not even saying, ‘We will look into it further,’ or, ‘We’re sorry that this happened to you.'”
Uber did not respond to National Post’s request for comment in time for publication.
Gabriel described herself as being openly Jewish and proudly displaying her Star of David. But she was reluctant to escalate the situation in person because the driver had her home address through the app. She also said she didn’t want to take the complaint further with Uber or include details about it online because she believed there wouldn’t be any point.
“This is why my expectations, especially since then, are lowered. That’s why I probably shut down and I said, ‘You know what? I’m not even talking to the media.’ Nobody wants to hear this. Nobody wants to listen,” she said.
“Nobody really cares here in Canada — in Canada specifically.”
A similar incident occurred when Woolf while was travelling in Europe over the summer.
Woolf was in Belgium with his wife and another couple in late August. They decided to take a day trip to Rotterdam in the Netherlands. After visiting the city’s Market Hall, they had to go back to the train station. Woolf ordered an Uber on his wife’s account, which they share.
When the male driver arrived, Woolf asked where he was from in a friendly tone. The driver said he was from Yemen. But when the driver asked Woolf the same question, he was upset at Woolf’s response: He was from Israel.
“He said, literally yelled at us, and said, ‘Get the hell out of my Uber!'” said Woolf.
Woolf thought the driver was joking at first, but the driver said he was not, and told him to get out of the vehicle. Woolf ordered another Uber and that ride went seamlessly, but the group was still scarred from the experience. The incident involving Mattova published by National Post this month reminded Woolf of what happened to him.
He reported the incident to Uber in an email on Aug. 27. He got a response saying the company was concerned and they flagged the driver. Uber said it would ensure the driver would not be matched with Woolf again.
“I wrote back, and I said that this response was the most asinine response I’ve ever received in my life. And it’s insulting that you would think that I’m so stupid to accept a response like that,” he said, adding that he was already on his way to back to Israel at that point, so the company’s solution didn’t make sense.
He expected Uber to remove the driver from the platform altogether, he said. He called it “disgusting” that the company would respond to an antisemitic incident in such a way.
A representative from Uber later called Woolf to tell him that the company would “take action,” but could not confirm if the driver would be suspended, citing “privacy issues.” He said his fare was refunded.
“That was their big gesture, and I wasn’t asking for any more. All I wanted was closure in the sense that he should be fired, right? And all they said was, ‘We can assure you we will take care of it, but we cannot let you know what we’re going to do, and you won’t hear about it,'” he said.
Uber did not respond to National Post’s request for comment about the incident.
Throughout all of his travels over the years, Woolf said he’s been open about his identity and it has never been a problem. He often wears a kippah, a cloth cap worn by Jewish men, which usually draws intrigue, rather than hate.
“I’ve often thought…that the more you more open you are about your Judaism, the freer you are,” he said. “I think every trip, I’ve worn a kippah, wherever it was. And I’ve never had an antisemitic incident before.”
In Israel, Woolf said he does not feel antisemitism at all.
“We feel totally safe here, despite the dangers of terrorism, but we feel extremely safe,” he said. In Canada, while he said he’s “not blind to the fact that at Bathurst and Sheppard every week you have people standing, yelling at each other on either side of the street and that antisemitism is rising,” he still feels safe in Toronto.
“Many people are starting to remove their mezuzahs (Jewish prayer scrolls affixed to doorways) and things like that. I would not do that. I feel safe. And I think the media has blown it out of proportion. It is getting worse, but I don’t think it’s at the level yet where people are to say, ‘This is Germany, 1939,'” he said. “I don’t feel unsafe in Canada.”
He said he hoped that Uber would publicly fire the driver who refused to take him “so that other people get the message.”
“I think the real way to deal with this is for those companies to be able to stand up and say, ‘No, we really are honestly against harassment or discrimination of any kind and anybody who does that should be fired. They shouldn’t be working for us,'” he said.
“If I was running a company and I had an employee who did that to another employee, I would fire the guy. There’s no ifs, ands, or buts about it, because it may start with the Jews, but it’ll spread to everybody.”
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