My Jewish Papers, Please

I have been Jewish for seventy years. I have the guilt to prove it. I have the chicken soup recipe, the opinions about other people’s chicken soup recipes, and the inability to leave a party without spending forty-five minutes saying goodbye at the door. Any Jewish grandmother in Montréal could identify me as one of hers from across a crowded room in under four seconds.

The State of Israel would like to see some documents.

This is entirely fair, and I say so as someone who spent thirty-four years running a travel agency. I have personally explained to hundreds of clients that the airline does not care who you are in your heart. It cares what your passport says. I just never imagined I would one day be on the other side of the counter, with a number in my hand, waiting for someone to confirm that I am who my mother always said I was.

Here is what most people do not know about making aliyah. Under the Law of Return, passed in 1950 and broadened in 1970, every Jew has the right to come home to Israel, and so do the children and grandchildren of Jews, along with their spouses. It is one of the most generous laws any country has ever written. But a right needs a proof, and the proof is your job.

The Jewish Agency, working with Nefesh B’Nefesh for those of us from North America, asks you to show that you are Jewish. The usual ways are a letter from a recognized rabbi who knows you and your family, your parents’ Jewish marriage certificate, a parent’s or grandparent’s burial record in a Jewish cemetery, or old community documents that tie you to the tribe. In other words, they want paper. Jews have been many things over the centuries, but we have not always been good at keeping paper. We were too busy leaving places in a hurry.

In my case there was an additional complication, and his name was Palefsky.

I was born Mark Elliott Palefsky, in Ottawa, in 1956. At some point in my childhood my family started calling ourselves Paull. Nobody went to a courthouse. Nobody filled out a form. My parents simply woke up one morning, decided they were Paulls, and from then on we were Paulls. It was a very Canadian kind of revolution: quiet, polite, and with no paperwork whatsoever.

This was fine for sixty-odd years. It was fine at school, at the bank, at the passport office. It turned out to be less fine when a government asks you to prove that the Jewish baby named Palefsky and the elderly applicant named Paull are, in fact, the same person.

“Do you have the legal name-change certificate?” they asked.

There is no certificate. There never was a certificate. My parents did not believe in certificates. They believed in brisket.

So began the dig. Old documents were found, scanned, renamed, labelled, and sent. Others were found to be the wrong documents and the search continued. Emails went back and forth. I learned that a file called “scan0047.jpg” is not acceptable, and that “Birth Certificate – Palefsky – Ottawa 1956.pdf” is. I learned that you can be a published author, a peer reviewer, and a man who once made his living behind a camera, and still be defeated by a PDF that refuses to go under four megabytes.

To their great credit, the people at Nefesh B’Nefesh were patient. Eventually they agreed that a name-change certificate that never existed could not be produced, and asked instead for the historical documents that showed the trail. Palefsky to Paull, Ottawa to Montréal, boy to old man. My whole life, labelled and attached.

Meanwhile, my greyhound was also emigrating.

Gaia is a Spanish galga, elegant, and completely unaware that she is about to become an Israeli. Her paperwork was in its own way more demanding than mine. She needed a microchip, a rabies vaccine, a blood test sent to an approved laboratory, and a veterinary certificate with a timeline worked out backwards like a NASA launch. But at no point did anyone ask Gaia to prove she was Spanish. Nobody wanted her grandmother’s burial record. Nobody asked whether her parents were married in a proper ceremony, which, frankly, I doubt.

The dog needed a blood test. I needed my ancestors.

I have thought a lot about why this process bothered me at first and why it no longer does. At first it felt like an insult. Seventy years a Jew, and now I have to prove it? But somewhere around the third round of scanning, I started to see it differently.
For most of Jewish history, being Jewish was something other people proved about you, usually to your great disadvantage. The papers were written by those who wanted us out. Here, for once, the papers are being collected by people who want us in. The question is not “Are you one of them?” with a knock on the door. The question is “Are you one of us?” with an open one.

That is worth a few emails.

It also did something I did not expect. Hunting for proof of who I am sent me back to who I came from. Names I had not spoken in years. My parents, who quietly turned Palefsky into Paull and had no idea that their son would one day have to explain it to a government in Jerusalem. The documents told a story I thought I knew, and showed me I only knew half of it.

So here is my advice to anyone of a certain age thinking about aliyah. Start looking for your papers now. Call the cousin who keeps everything. Ask the rabbi while the rabbi still remembers you. Find out whether anyone in your family ever, as mine did, simply decided to become someone else on a Tuesday. And label your files properly.

The Jewish people survived Pharaoh, Babylon, Rome, and the Inquisition. Surely I could survive a scanner.

I did. The proof is in. The file is closed. Next spring, God willing, Gaia and I land in the Galilee: one Spanish greyhound with impeccable veterinary records, and one old Jew from Montréal with a birth certificate in a name he has not used since he was a boy.

At last, both of us will be exactly who our papers say we are. Well, mostly.