A Jackson, Mississippi Reform rabbi says he was thrown out of a restaurant after the owner made an anti-Semitic remark and then found out he was Jewish.
Ted Riter of the Beth Israel Congregation wrote on his Facebook page that he went to Wraps in Maywood Mart last Tuesday for lunch, and ordered a salad.
He said a man he believed to be the owner replied, “A full size or a Jewish size?”
Riter told his Facebook friends that he then asked, with a “quizzical” look – “What does that mean?”
To this, the man replied, “It’s small. Jews are cheap and small. Everybody knows that.”
Riter said he then asked, “Did you really just say that?” and the man asked him if he was a Jew. When Riter said yes, he was told to leave the restaurant.
“Expletives, F-bombs, and since I’d never been the recipient of that before, I was in shock, so I didn’t register it until the second or third time he told me to leave,” Riter said, according to the Clarion Ledger. “It was a bit surreal. So I left.”
According to the report, Riter has received an outpouring of support on Facebook. However, Riter’s posts on the matter appear to have been deleted.
‘A smaller salad’
The Clarion Ledger quoted Riter as saying: “If he had said, ‘Ugh, I’m sorry,’ and laughed it off as, ‘I shouldn’t use that term’ or something of that nature, if he had just intended it as an off-color joke, I wouldn’t have appreciated it but I would have been fine. But to turn around and tell me to get out of his restaurant… I can’t even offer a guess as to what he was thinking.”
16 WAPT quoted Wraps owner John Ellis, also known as Yianni Allis – who apparently was the person who offended Riter – as saying: “The guy said he didn’t want to do any business with us. He was probably offended because we offer different salads – that’s all. I said, ‘Greek salad or Jew?’ We have different salads. We have Carlito’s Way Salad. We have Grecian Salad. We have Jewish Salad. We have Greek Salad. We have Cesar Salad – we have a lot of salads. Names of salads derive from people; they don’t derive from the sky.”
“I said it was a smaller salad than the larger salad,” Ellis reportedly said. “Again, it’s misunderstood. I didn’t know the man. I didn’t know if he was Jewish.”
Neither the menu at the restaurant nor the online version made any mention of a Jewish salad, 16 WAPT‘s Hadas Brown reported. Ellis said a Jewish salad contains French-fried potatoes, feta cheese, cucumbers, tomatoes, flat-leaf parsley and mint.
Riter appears to want to put the affair behind him. It was reported last week that Ellis and Riter were to sit down last Friday and work out their differences. “If we misunderstood each other, I’d gladly embrace him and make friends,” Ellis said. “It was extremely busy, he was extremely indecisive. I don’t know if you’ve ever been in a small place like this, but if he misunderstood me, I’m sorry.”
“I would gladly accept his offer. I’d be happy to sit down with him,” Riter said.
“This is an intense time for us of spiritual exploration, of repentance and asking forgiveness and giving forgiveness,” Riter said.
Because of the holiday preparation, Riter said he couldn’t meet until Friday, but Ellis agreed to a meeting time between the two. Riter, who has only been in Jackson about three months, said he doesn’t plan to take legal action against Ellis.
“I don’t want to cause a further rift between the store owner and the larger Jackson community,” Riter said.
In a comment on the Clarion-Ledger website, Jason McDonald of Brookhaven said: “I worked for John around 2000 when I was a student at Millsaps in his restaurant on I-55 frontage road next to Outback Steakhouse. He was offensive and arrogant to employees and customers alike. I personally witnessed similar outbursts like this resulting in multiple people being thrown out or leaving on their own accord. I 100 percent believe the rabbi’s account of the story because I witnessed so many incidents like this during my time of employment in John’s restaurant. This is not an isolated misunderstanding that happened once.”
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