Winding road to B-G Airport terminal was built to appease Chabad

A demand by ultra-Orthodox Jews to not allow traffic to pass near to their community on Shabbat was behind the Transportation Ministry’s decision to build the long and winding road that takes drivers from the Jerusalem-Tel Aviv highway to the terminal at Ben Gurion International Airport, it was revealed.

Drivers have to double back on themselves once they enter the spaghetti-like complex of internal airport roads.

The circuitous route means some 16 million drivers annually have to plow an extra six kilometers (3.7 miles) and take eight and a half minutes more to reach the terminal, which opened in 2004 to replace the old Terminal 1 as the main international gateway to and from the country.

By the year 2020, 20 million people will travel the route annually to the airport, driving a total of 190 million additional miles, equal to 4,000 trips around the globe, using 17.2 million liters of gasoline, Channel 10 reported Wednesday.

Original plans for a new third terminal in the 1990s called for a direct, one-kilometer (0.6-mile) connecting road to link it to the main highway, the report said.

But residents of Kfar Chabad, most of whom belong to the Chabad Hasidic sect, objected to traffic passing close to their village on Shabbat and recruited their leader, Lubavitcher Rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneerson, who has since died, to throw his political weight behind the opposition to the move.

Former airport director Zeev Sarig told Channel 10 that the transport minister at the time, Yitzhak Levy (National Religious Party), decided that a direct road would only be built once the number of annual travelers to the airport reached 12 million.

“The Chabad community feared the Shabbat desecration,” Levy, who ran the transport ministry from 1996 to 1998, told the TV reporter. “They didn’t want the road to pass through; there was involvement from their rabbi in New York. At that time, it seemed we should take the Chabad community into account… that it would really affect their quality of life.”

The 12 million ceiling was breached in 2011 and the National Roads company began to plan a shortcut via a tunnel on the way in and a regular road on the way out — designed to minimize the disturbance to Kfar Chabad. Initial estimates put the cost at NIS 200 million (around $52 million at today’s rates), the report said.

However, the National Roads company is still making changes to satisfy Chabad, and has doubled the planned width of the tunnel, which will double or even triple costs — money nobody has at present for what is seen as a low priority project, the TV report said.