Thousands could collect from Avis as suit attains class-action status

WASHINGTON, Feb. 16 (JTA) — A lawsuit accusing Avis Rent-a-Car of denying Jews the benefits of corporate accounts could allow thousands of prospective customers to collect damages. A federal judge last week granted class-action status to the lawsuit, filed by a Fort Lauderdale man and a Chicago bookstore owner, who claim the nation’s second-largest rental car firm deliberately barred Jewish customers from holding accounts and labeled them with the code word “yeshiva.” Others were given worthless accounts carrying reduced benefits, the 1997 lawsuit claims. Avis has said it instituted the policy as a way of flagging unqualified drivers who were trying to circumvent the company’s age restrictions. The company said college students were calling and asking for corporate accounts for their yeshiva, which would allow drivers younger than 25 to rent cars. When some of the cars were returned with damage, Avis employees were told to watch out for “yeshivas.” Avis said the word yeshiva was not used in a derogatory or discriminatory way, but simply as shorthand for identifying the problem it had encountered. But the lawsuit alleges that Avis put the yeshiva label on corporate applicants calling from areas known to have heavy Jewish populations or if callers had a name or accent indicating they may be Jewish. In his order issued last week, U.S. District Judge Alan Gold in Miami said the testimony from former Avis employees showed that “thousands of potential customers” had been turned down after being identified with the code word. “It is undisputed that Avis employed a ‘yeshiva’ policy and the ‘yeshiva’ policy emanated from its World Reservations Center” in Tulsa, Okla., the judge said in opening the way for more than 10,000 Jewish customers of Avis during the mid-1990s to become involved in the suit. Avis intends to appeal the ruling to the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta. New York Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, who initiated an investigation into discriminatory practices by rental car companies in 1997, said he was “gratified that the court found sufficient evidence of a discriminatory Avis policy toward Jewish customers” to permit the case to proceed. Silver said the assembly’s investigation found a pattern of Avis corporate practices that included allegations of preferential rental rates, fuel price gouging and outright refusal to rent.