Aliyah Paperwork

I have discovered something important about making aliyah.

Wanting to go to Israel is not the same as Israel saying, “Come on over.”

For several happy weeks I floated around the aliyah universe. I emailed people. People emailed me back — promptly, warmly, like actual human beings. We had conversations. I was planning Karmiel, pricing flights, researching how one transports a Spanish greyhound across the Atlantic, and generally behaving like a man whose largest remaining problem was where to put the bookshelf.

Then a friend asked, “You know you still have to be approved?”

Approved?

I’m Jewish.

Apparently this is not, in itself, documentary evidence.

The warm and helpful people are not the people who decide. They help; they do not authorize. Eligibility under the Law of Return is determined by the Jewish Agency. The visa comes afterwards, and only if the answer is yes.

So somewhere in an office I will never see sits a person I will never meet, holding a file, deciding whether I am Jewish.

I have managed seventy years without a second opinion. Apparently the file requires one.

I had mentally arrived at Step Six while administratively standing at Step One, holding a hat.

Then I looked at the document list.

Passport. Birth certificate. Apostille. Proof of Judaism. Civil-status documents where applicable. Criminal background check. Forms. An interview. Originals to be produced later, in person, presumably while maintaining eye contact.

The birth certificate must show my parents’ names. Proof of Judaism ordinarily means a recent letter, on official synagogue letterhead, from a recognized rabbi, explaining how he knows me and confirming that I am Jewish and born of a Jewish mother.

The rabbi’s signature must be in ink.

Ink.

I am not making aliyah. I am applying for membership in a very old club with an unusually thorough admissions committee and firm views on the ballpoint pen.

I understand this. I genuinely do. The Law of Return is a law. Eligibility matters. Governments require evidence. Israel cannot operate an immigration system on the basis of a man arriving at Ben Gurion, gesturing broadly at himself, and saying, “Look.”

But if I may be permitted one small kvetch: seriously?

I went to Talmud Torah.

I had a bris. I did not consent to it, I have not entirely forgiven everyone involved, but it happened, and there were witnesses.

I had a bar mitzvah.

Shabbat candles were the furniture of my childhood.

My grandmother, Mina Kornfeld Geiger, ran the Mount Carmel and other kosher hotels in the Laurentian mountains north of Montreal, in the years when the other hotels would not take us. My mother, Rose, grew up in that Jewish hotel world and became a well-known travel agent.

There is a file about my grandmother in a Jewish archive in this city. My mother deposited it in 1994, along with a tape of herself describing those hotels. I can produce a catalogue record. I cannot produce a rabbi.

And in 1969, aged thirteen, I stood at the Kotel in Jerusalem and had a second bar mitzvah ceremony — on the general principle that one can never be too careful.

Then there is the part I had genuinely forgotten to count.

In 1973 my chapter of AZA — Ben Tovim, the Aleph Zadik Aleph, the boys’ order of B’nai B’rith Youth — elected me its Aleph Godol. Its president. That summer I went to Starlight, Pennsylvania, to the International Leadership Training Conference. The following year, in the order’s fiftieth anniversary year, my district elected me its Aleph Godol. District 1-22 then ran from Vermont and New Hampshire down through New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut and Rhode Island, and north into Quebec, Ontario, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland and Labrador.

I was eighteen years old and I presided over Jewish teenagers across six states and six provinces. I went to B’nai B’rith conferences in Washington, in Boston, in New York.

There are minutes. There are officer lists. There is, in an archive somewhere, a fifty-year-old page with my name on it under a heading in Hebrew.

It is the wrong page.

What is wanted is a rabbi, and a pen.

I am seventy years old.

At this point I am tempted to send in a DNA sample, a photograph of my grandmother, my complete Talmud Torah attendance record, and an audio file of me saying “Oy” under controlled laboratory conditions.

Or simply put me in a room with two other Jews and a question about where to buy the best bagels.

If we argue for forty-five minutes, nobody moves an inch, at least one of us cites a bakery that closed in 1974, and the argument ends not in agreement but in a sudden change of subject — application approved.

There is, admittedly, a reason for the documentation.

I recently rewatched the series Hunters, with Al Pacino. He plays Meyer Offerman, a Jewish Holocaust survivor leading a team of Nazi hunters — until the story reveals that the man presenting himself as Meyer is in fact the Nazi Wilhelm Zuchs, living under Meyer’s stolen identity.

So yes. Check the paperwork.

I withdraw approximately twelve percent of my complaint.

The remaining eighty-eight percent is traditional Jewish complaining and may therefore itself constitute supporting evidence of Jewish identity. I would like this entered into the file.

Still, there is something surreal about searching seventy years of your own life for documents proving a thing that has never once required proof inside your own head.

I know who my mother was. I know who my grandmother was. I know the houses and the stories I came from. I know the prayers, the food, the arguments, the humour, the losses, and the strange invisible thread that has always tied my family to a people scattered across the world.

Now I need the long-form version.

With an apostille.

Fine.

I will find it.

And I will find a rabbi who can write the letter. Preferably a rabbi with a pen. Ideally a rabbi who answers email — though I recognize that I may be requesting two miracles in a single paragraph.

My target remains Karmiel. I would love to arrive before Purim.

Purim has always delighted me, and perhaps growing up in North America helped. We had Halloween, in which children put on costumes and roam the streets demanding food from strangers.

Purim takes that same basic concept and adds the Megillah, hamantaschen, noise, wine, an attempted annihilation, a miraculous survival and several thousand years of Jewish memory.

Only Jews could take an attempted extermination and turn it into a holiday with a signature pastry.

I love the thought of being in Israel when an entire country goes slightly meshugge on schedule.

I am not personally planning to dress as Queen Esther. At seventy I have reached the age at which attending a costume celebration dressed as myself can reasonably be described as a conceptual piece.

But I want to see Jewish time become national time.

That may be the thing I am looking for most.

Here, Purim happens inside a community. Pesach happens inside a community. Shabbat happens inside a community — in the houses and the shuls — while the larger city carries on around you, indifferent, delivering parcels.

In Israel, the calendar itself changes. The buses know. The supermarket knows. The whole country moves.

If the paperwork takes longer and I miss Purim, then perhaps Pesach. There would be something almost too neat about arriving for a holiday whose central story is leaving one country and beginning the long, complicated, badly organized journey toward another.

Meanwhile, the summer here is ending.

I may have one winter left in this city.

I have already had seventy of them, so I am not frightened. In fact I will miss them. I will miss the first snow. The strange silence after a storm. The wind howling outside while I am inside with coffee and a dog who has taken the entire sofa as a matter of principle.

And I will miss the annual ritual in which the snowplough carefully relocates the entire street into the precise spot where you parked your car.

Fortunately, Israel has YouTube.

If I become nostalgic, I can watch somebody else shovel.

This week brought another anniversary, quietly and without paperwork: I was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes in 1967. Fifty-nine years.

I am not going to write it up properly here. It deserves its own post rather than a paragraph at the end of one about apostilles, and it will get one.

I mention it only because it is the reason I am not frightened of the document list.

Fifty-nine years of Type 1 teaches you one thing above all others, and it is not courage. It is method. You take an enormous, permanent, non-negotiable problem and you reduce it, every single day, to the next small decision. Not the disease. The next injection. Not the ocean. The next form.

So:

Find the birth certificate.

Find the rabbi.

Get the letter.

Get the apostille.

Fill in the forms.

One thing at a time.

I was eleven when diabetes arrived. I could not have imagined being seventy. I certainly could not have imagined being seventy and preparing to cross an ocean with a Spanish greyhound, settle in the Galilee, write, spend time around dogs, and begin again.

B’ezrat Hashem, that is what I intend to do.

I know Israel will drive me crazy. Good. I know Israelis. The sabra stereotype exists for a reason — hard and prickly outside, soft inside. I fully expect to be shouted at in a supermarket for blocking the aisle by a man who then insists on carrying my groceries home and, on the way, explains where I ought really to be living.

I can live with that.

I am not going to Israel expecting paradise. I am going expecting Israel.

I want a modest home. Gaia. A desk. Something worth writing about. A few dogs around. A chevra. And a grocery store where I will eventually work out which of the lines is actually a line.

I’m Jewish.

And apparently the supporting documentation is on its way.