Air Force Over-Head
OUR COMMUNITY
Head coverings led Jewish and Muslim captains from Detroit to form a fast friendship. BARBARA LEWIS CONTRIBUTING WRITER
H
COURTESY OF YOSEF HOCHHEISER
Maysaa Ouza and Yosef Hochheiser
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JUNE 10 • 2021
e’s a kippah-wearing Jew from Oak Park and she’s a hijab-wearing Muslim from Dearborn — and the friendship they have forged in the U.S. Air Force has a lot to do with religion. Yosef (Yossie/Joe) Hochheiser and Maysaa Ouza are both captains in the Judge Advocate General (JAG) corps of the U.S. Air Force. For Hochheiser, 38, it’s a part-time gig as a member of the Air Force Reserves. But most of his workweek is spent as a civilian domestic violence magistrate judge in Cuyahoga County, Ohio. In 2016, Hochheiser was doing his reserve duty at Youngstown Air Reserve Station in Ohio when he was asked to research the issue of providing a religious accommodation for a Muslim recruit who wanted to wear a hijab. Hochheiser himself had received a religious accommodation to wear a kippah when he joined up. Ouza, the daughter of Lebanese immigrants, was about to graduate from the University of Toledo law school when she applied to be a JAG officer. She requested a religious accommodation to wear the hijab, the headscarf that many Muslim women use to cover their hair. The Air Force told her she could request a religious accommodation only after
going through officer training school, which she would have to do without the hijab. This she did not want to do. Hochheiser worked on the matter during one of his oneweek periods of Reserves duty and submitted a report that said more research was needed on the issue. Then he forgot about it. Meanwhile, Ouza turned to the American Civil Liberties Union, which in 2015 had handled a case involving a Sikh man who needed an accommodation to wear a turban in the ROTC. A federal judge ruled that the Army could not deny him the accommodation. When the ACLU pointed out the similarity of Ouza’s case, the Air Force reconsidered and gave Ouza the religious accommodation before she commissioned. They also implemented a policy that should help them avoid such problems in the future. SEEDS OF FRIENDSHIP In 2018, Hochheiser was reassigned to the 88th Air Base Wing at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton. A few months later, he saw a piece produced for NBC’s Left Field about Muslims in the military. It focused on an active-duty Air Force JAG officer whose request to wear the hijab had led to a policy change. He thought it must
