A group representing thousands of Israelis living abroad is preparing to sue the government for denying their children entrance into the country, even though they are Israeli citizens.
A letter of demand before taking legal action was sent several days ago by the Israeli lawyers representing the group to Attorney General Avichai Mendelblit, Interior Minister Ayelet Shaked, Foreign Minister Yair Lapid, Diaspora Affairs Minister Nachman Shai and Population and Immigration Authority Director Shlomo Mor-Yosef.
Batya Sachs, one of the lawyers representing the group, said she planned to file the suit in the High Court of Justice within the next few days to ensure that Israeli expats would be able to follow through with their plans to visit the country this summer. The group is demanding that their children be allowed to enter the country this summer using their foreign passports, as they were accustomed to doing in the past.
In the letter of demand, the lawyers note that “thousands, if not tens of thousands” of Israeli expats face the unusual situation today of not being able to bring their children on summer vacation to Israel because they were never registered in the Population Registry and didn’t have Israeli passports.
Sachs said she will argue that since these children of Israelis are already Israeli citizens, barring them from the country is a violation of their basic civil rights. “They can’t have it both ways,” she said. “If they have no choice in the matter and are automatically citizens because they were born to Israeli parents, then these kids have every right to enter the country, regardless of whether they have registered at the consulate and have an Israeli passport,” she said.
Israel’s Citizenship Law, passed in 1952, stipulates that anybody born to an Israeli citizen is automatically an Israeli citizen as well. Another law, passed more than a decade later, requires all Israelis with children born outside the country to register them at the nearby Israeli consulate. Yet another law requires that all Israeli citizens use their Israeli passports when traveling into and out of the country.
But until the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic, these requirements were rarely, if ever, enforced. In fact, according to the lawyers’ letter, thousands of Israelis living abroad had never been aware that such requirements existed, since they were never requested to show their children’s Israeli passports when traveling to the country.
Since March 2020, barring rare exceptions, the Israeli government has prohibited foreigners from entering the country in order to prevent the spread of COVID-19. However, since most people refrained from travelling during the lockdown period, the issue was not relevant until recent months.
'Simply cruel'
In early April, the government announced that children of Israelis would not be able to enter the country without Israeli passports. That was the first time it had attempted to enforce the law, which had been on the books for decades.
What many Israeli expats discovered when trying to register their children and obtain Israeli passports for them was that the process was cumbersome, if not outright impossible. Israeli consulates abroad found themselves unable to cope with the enormous number of requests for appointments and inquiries over the phone, making it increasingly difficult for these families to fulfill the new requirements and obtain all the necessary documentation before their scheduled flights.
For many families, a key challenge was the requirement that they provide two examples of proof of “fruit of the loins” – that is, either old ultrasounds, blood tests or hospital documents proving that they were the biological parents of the child or children (adopted children and children of surrogates are required to provide other forms of documentation, often at much greater expense, to prove their familial relationship to their Israeli parents). Many families would soon discover that such evidence was unobtainable because too many years had passed for it to be retrieved from hospital records. In some cases, where only one parent was Israeli, the non-Israeli spouse or ex-spouse would refuse to allow the child or children to apply for Israeli passports, thereby preventing them from visiting their Israeli relatives.
In an effort to alleviate some of the bureaucracy, the government announced in early May that it would allow children of Israeli expats into the country on their foreign passports, provided that they completed the process of registering their children at their nearest consulate within 60 days of returning to their country of origin. They were told that in order to obtain permits for their children to travel to Israel on foreign passports, they would need to submit official requests to their local consulate three weeks before their scheduled flights. Many discovered that given the backlog at the consulates, this was not sufficient time to guarantee that their children would have their permits before their flights.
A Facebook group set up in recent weeks to allow those Israeli expats affected by the change in regulations to share information and organize has more than 4,000 members. Roman Pogorelov, one of the administrators, said the group had already raised 60,000 shekels through a crowdfunding campaign to finance their petition to the court.
“All we are asking is that every Israeli be allowed to visit the country with their immediate family as they always have,” said Pogorelov, who lives in Atlanta, where he works in high-tech. It took him five months, he said, to obtain the permits he needed to fly with his children to Israel this week. “This is something that not only affects so many Israelis living abroad but also their families in Israel who are deprived of the right to see them. It is simply cruel.”
Nimrod Erez, an Israeli who has been living in Los Angeles for the past 20 years, had been planning to visit his family this summer, as he has every summer (aside from last year during the coronavirus lockdown) with his wife and daughter. “My daughter has two great-grandmothers living in Israel, both in their nineties, one a Holocaust survivor and one a former fighter in the Palmach (the pre-state Jewish army),” he said in a phone call from Berlin, where he is visiting his wife’s family.
A documentary filmmaker, Erez is running the crowdfunding campaign for the group. He said he never even bothered trying to get an Israeli passport for his daughter, who holds both American and German passports, “because the requirements were way too tough.” The fact that his 12-year-old daughter could not travel to Israel this summer, he said, meant that neither could he or his wife, and it had left them feeling “very upset and frustrated.”
Tair Kedar is married to a Canadian Jew and has been living in Canada for nearly 20 years. The couple has two children, one adopted and one born through a surrogate. Both are Canadian citizens, and she and her husband are registered as their parents on their Canadian birth certificates. “For them to be registered as Israeli citizens, we would have to produce ‘fruit of the loin’ certificates, which we obviously don’t have, or go through complicated court proceedings to prove that they are legally our children,” she said. “I have neither the inclination nor the money to go through that. I’ll let them choose for themselves when they’re older.”
She said her 88-year-old mother, who was left all by herself in Israel during the pandemic “is going out of her mind from loneliness and wants to see us and my sister, who lives with her family in Holland, but it’s impossible.”
The American-born son of an Israeli mother, Daniel Garcia-Galili, 37, never held an Israeli passport but spent every summer in Israel as a child. His mother has since moved back to Israel, and when he applied for a permit to visit her, he was told that he could only visit Israel on an Israeli passport, and at his age, he would need to apply for that passport in Israel. “Essentially, they’ve said I can only enter Israel with an Israeli passport, and I can only get an Israeli passport after I’ve entered Israel,” he said, noting the irony of his situation.
Hagit (who did not want her surname published) has been living in the United States for 15 years and has two sons, aged 11 and 12. Her ex-husband, a U.S. citizen, did not want the children to have Israeli passports and even had that written into their divorce agreement. “Until now, because the law was never enforced, I was able to bring my children to Israel once a year, and sometimes even more, on their American passports, and nobody ever said anything,” she said.
“Because they’ve changed the rules, I’m now forced to hire a lawyer at the cost of thousands of dollars to contest the divorce agreement, and who knows if I’ll win," she said. "It makes me especially sad because I don’t know when my kids will get to see their grandparents again, who aren’t getting any younger and who aren’t able to take long flights anymore. It seems so unfair that on one bright, sunny day, the Israel government suddenly decided to change the rules on us.”
Asked if the Foreign Ministry was aware of the problem and looking into solutions, a spokeswoman said it was. “The Foreign Ministry worked in collaboration with the Population Registry to postpone the implementation of the new policy so as to allow families enough time to prepare for the registration requirement and enable them to come to Israel during the coronavirus crisis. In addition, the ministry is working to assist its representatives abroad, including by opening a help center in Jerusalem and other measures meant to deal with the huge volume of inquiries and to shorten the amount of time required to address them."
Responding to these allegations, the Interior Ministry spokeswoman said: “The fact that there are Israelis who choose not to act in accordance with Israeli law and not to register their children does not make this right, and they have no one to blame but themselves.”
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