PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — A food truck festival that was supposed to happen in Kensington on Father's Day was canceled because of a controversial decision by organizers to uninvite an Israeli participant.
The vendors who run the Moshava Philly food truck said they were told not to come to The Taste of Home festival in Kensington on Sunday because of rumors of possible protests as tensions rise over real world events taking place in the Middle East.
The Moshava Philly food truck owners said they felt like the festival organizers did not stand up for them and that they were intimidated. Groups including the Jewish Federation of Greater Philadelphia say they were disturbed by the incident.
Melvin Powell with Sunflower Philly, one of the groups that organized the festival, explained that Israeli and Palestinian food trucks had come to events before, and there was an agreement that one couldn't be there without the other.
Powell told NBC 10 that the Palestinian food truck had to back out this year for an unrelated reason.
"The fact that we couldn't accurately represent both of them is the reason why we cancel this event today," he said.
Moshava in a follow-up Instagram post said that the situation was greatly mishandled, but they did not believe the organizers were motivated by anti-Semitism.
All the groups involved in the controversy will be meeting in the coming days to discuss what went wrong, how the situation could have been handled better, and how to proceed from here.