A pair of heartless DMV workers forced an ultra-Orthodox Brooklyn mom to strip her religious head covering for a driver’s license photo — leaving her “traumatized” and fearing an antisemitic ambush.
Sara Fellig ultimately complied with what she described as the “coerced violation” of her faith and has lived with the shame ever since, she said in a Brooklyn Federal Court lawsuit.
“Forcing Ms. Fellig — or any married, ultra-Orthodox Jewish woman who wears a head covering — to remove [their] head covering in public is akin to forcing a secular person to strip naked in front of strangers, carrying all the same shame, humiliation, and abasement,” she said in the court papers filed against the state Department of Motor Vehicles.
Two of Fellig’s three young daughters, all of whom were under 4, were ill and she was forced to drag one of the sick youngsters with her to the Atlantic Avenue DMV office in downtown Brooklyn for her November appointment, she said in legal papers.
As she always does in public, Fellig was wearing a partial wig, or sheitel, along with a small hat. In Orthodox Judaism, a married woman’s hair is considered a sacred thing which should only be viewed by her husband.
When it was time to take her photo, one of the workers insisted Fellig remove the head covering.
State law forbids photos which “obscure” a person’s face or make identification difficult, but Fellig claims her hat and wig were not covering her face.
So she protested, prompting the worker to ask if she wore the hat for religious purposes.
But when the young mom said yes, the employee bizarrely declared: “Well you still can’t wear your hat,” according to the lawsuit.
A second worker failed to intervene or correct the first employee, despite state law allowing those with “sincerely held religious beliefs” to obtain an exemption.
“Ms. Fellig was so disturbed by the prospect of removing her head covering in public that she contemplated calling her rabbi to discuss the unlawful circumstances she was facing,” she said in the legal claim.
But mindful of past hateful episodes, Fellig hesitated. In 2020, on Empire Boulevard, a passerby called her a “f–king Jew,” and in 2023 on the same street, a bigot told her, “the Nazis should have finished their job, you f–king Jewish bitch.”
With nearly 100 people in the room, and “mindful of shifting sentiments against the Jewish community due to the war in Gaza . . . Ms. Fellig decided not to call her rabbi, worried that onlookers would believe her to be an angry Jewish person seeking to make trouble.”
Instead, she removed her head covering and stood for the photo and was “overcome with guilt,” she said in the legal filing, in which she demands unspecified damages, the destruction of her current license photo and a free replacement.
“Each time someone views the photograph, Ms. Fellig experiences a renewed desecration of her religious beliefs,” according to the lawsuit.
“Ms. Fellig’s emotional damages will continue and multiply until a new photograph is taken and a new license issued,” she said in the court papers, adding, “she fears condemnation from her Chabad community — and her rabbi — if they discover that her official New York State ID depicts her without appropriate headgear.”
“The DMV has the right rule in place — but, for no reason at all, it wasn’t followed in Ms. Fellig’s case,” her attorney, Emma Freeman, said.
