In Greenberg v Seton Education Partners, No. 600733/2024, 2025 N.Y. Slip Op. 25026, 2025 WL 396770 (Sup Ct, Jan. 30, 2025), the court, inter alia, held that plaintiff sufficiently alleged claim(s) of failure to accommodate religion.
From the decision:
In this case, the Court finds that the Plaintiff’s Amended Complaint, as amplified in her proposed Second Amended Complaint, alleges sufficient facts to state a cause of action for religious discrimination based on failure to accommodate. The Plaintiff alleges in her Amended Complaint, as amplified in her proposed Second Amended Complaint, that she is an observant Jew, and that under applicable Jewish law she is proscribed from working on certain Jewish holidays such as Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, and Simchas Torah. She further alleges that while employed, she had a dispute regarding whether she could take off for Jewish holidays, and that Defendant Hanratty offered to let Plaintiff take off some of the holidays but not all of them. She alleges that she and Defendant Hanratty got into a heated discussion in late September of 2022 concerning the issue of her taking the days off, and that during such discussion Mr. Hanratty threatened to fire the Plaintiff if she had excessive absences due to religious observance. Plaintiff alleges that she made clear during the discussion that she needed the days off for religious reasons. Plaintiff alleges that after their discussion, she took off for Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, and Simchas Torah, and that she was discharged from employment shortly (ten [10] days) after she was absent for Simchas Torah.
The Court finds that, accepting as true all of the allegations in the Plaintiff’s Amended Complaint, and proposed Second Amended Complaint, that the Plaintiff has sufficiently pleaded facts which state a claim for failure to accommodate. While the Defendants argue that Plaintiff’s Amended Complaint fails to state that taking additional days off for unnamed holidays would not cause an undue hardship on Brilla, the Court finds that such allegation is not a requirement to state a claim for failure to accommodate. (See Knight v. Connecticut Dept. of Pub. Health, 275 F.3d 156, 167 [2d Cir. 2001]).
On the other hand, the Court agrees that the Plaintiff has failed to state a claim for retaliation, and that the proposed Second Amended Complaint does not remedy the insufficiency to plead such claim in the Amended Complaint.
Based on this, the court granted defendant’s motion to dismiss, except denied defendant’s motion as to plaintiff’s failure to accommodate claim.