An Egged bus passenger filed a complaint with the company this week after her driver refused to stop at her station because of its proximity to a haredi (ultra-Orthodox) neighborhood as the Sabbath was about to begin, Army Radio reported. Jenny Skorasky boarded the last 376 bus from Tel Aviv last Friday to visit her parents in the southern town of Ofakim. The bus driver, however, decided to skip her stop, claiming that to get there he would have to drive through a religious neighborhood close to the start of Shabbat. "I got approval six weeks ago that when Shabbat comes in early, I'm not entering this place. You can walk," the bus driver told Skorasky after she asked him why he bypassed the route to her spot. An argument broke out, lasting nearly 15 minutes and involving other passengers. Skorasky finally decided to just exit the bus at a stop far from her home. "What is most infuriating to me is not that I had to walk half an hour to get to my house, but that Egged changed the bus route without informing passengers, and they think this is fine," Skorasky said. "They decided to take authority into their own hands on religious matters and Shabbat, and gave in to religious terrorism." Skorasky filed a complaint with Egged, but the company has so far not responded, Army Radio said. Knesset Member Nitzan Horowitz (Meretz) criticized the conduct of the bus company, and said that the problem went far beyond this one incident. "This is a very serious case, he said. There are buses that stop entering certain areas even before Shabbat comes in ... It is absurd that there is no transportation here over the weekend because of religious coercion in Israel." Egged confirmed that it issued an order barring tis drivers from entering religious neighborhoods if Shabbat was about to begin. However, following the Army Radio report, the bus company apparently asked permission from the Transportation Ministry to leave Tel Aviv earlier on Fridays to prevent, in Egged's words, "putting the buses at risk" of arriving at religious neighborhoods near the start of Shabbat.
