I've seen this very thing happen! Thank God the woman was okay, but it was some hippy chick in college who was talked into joined her friends in a step aerobics class and instead decided to walk on a stair climber while they were in class. The skirt got stuck in the track near the top of the device and ripped it clean off of her. She was scraped up real good, but she had to be taken back to her dorm with a towel around her waist on account of her being down to her panties.
This is just stupid. It's like people who work out in jeans. I just don't get what you think you're doing. There's zero advantage to that and you look like a fool doing it.
This Jewish woman could invest in some leggings or Yoga pants and likely still conform to her sect's modesty laws.
I knew some very conservative Catholics, mother and daughters, who wouldn’t join a certain gym (all female) because the women there “dressed immodestly.” (They didn’t spell it out, but I suspected that their notion of “immodesty” was probably pretty unreasonable.)
I had two thoughts, which I didn’t dare voice:
Don’t make other people responsible for YOUR chastity.
Don’t imagine that YOUR body is so spectacular that you have a duty never to wear anything more revealing than a burka.
They can’t wear pants. They have to put a skirt over it. But they can wear a really tight stretchy knee length skirt that wouldn’t get stuck in a machine, with leggings under neath.