Expats’ fury at demand for decades-old pregnancy proof for kids to visit Israel

One woman told the JC how she was being asked to provide proof of a relationship with her husband before her teenage daughter was born.

Another parent was asked to hand over the hospital discharge letter for a son born almost ten years earlier. A third was asked to show scans from the third trimester of her pregnancy for a daughter who is now 12.

The bureaucratic hurdles, which are being imposed in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, have kept thousands of families apart this summer, crushing the hopes of British-born children to be reunited with Israeli grandparents after more than a year apart.

A group of 36 Israeli expats have now filed a petition in the High Court challenging the move as “unconstitutional”.

More than 4,000 people in the UK and US have signed up to a Facebook campaign calling on the Israeli government to think again about what they have branded “enforced citizenship” of their children.

Israel’s Citizenship Law, passed in 1952, states that anyone born to an Israeli citizen is automatically Israeli too.

A decade later, a second law was passed that required Israeli expats with children born outside the country to register their birth with the consulate, while a third required all Israeli citizens to travel in and out of the country on their Israeli passports.

These laws were rarely enforced before the pandemic and children of Israeli expats frequently visited Israel on the passports issued by the country of their birth.

Since March, 2020, however, Israel has prevented foreigners from entering the country to prevent the spread of the disease — resurrecting and strictly enforcing previously ignored legislation to keep its citizens safe.

With vaccination programmes in Israel and Britain making travel possible again, families desperate to reunite have been caught up in the unintended consequences of these old laws.

One woman caught up in the change said she had made repeated trips to the Israeli embassy in London with more and more documentation to prove her daughter was her biological child.

She said: “It is an absolute Kafkaesque nightmare. No one ever answers the phone, I have gone back and forth to (the embassy) I have to find more and more documents, I am losing sleep over this.”

The woman, who did not wish to be named for fear it would set back her claim, had to submit a Freedom of Information request to the hospital where her daughter was born but was told even that was not enough to issue the Israeli passport now declared necessary.

She said: “The ironic thing is the Israeli government is penalising us because we are Israeli. No other country imposes its citizenship in this way — others have dual passports, not this, this is just a nightmare. And I think of people my age whose parents did not register them before birth — they are trying to find documents from decades ago.

“For us the last resort is a DNA test but that has to be done by someone approved by the family court in Israel. Does that mean we have to go out there for a court hearing? I just don’t know, all I know is this makes no sense to me.”

Documents seen by the JC outline the demands now being made of parents to get Israeli passports for their children so they can visit grandparents and reunite with old friends and family. It includes the “long version” of the birth certificate and demands that it be “legalised by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office”.

In addition parents must secure “documentation from the hospital or maternity ward that the mother in fact gave birth and that said child is in fact her offspring”.

The “hospital discharge letter of the mother after birth” is also listed of proof but many parents are facing an uphill battle to find this information.

For children requiring passports, both parents must attend the embassy to make the application, even if the couple are now divorced.

The Facebook campaign includes parents married to non-Israelis who do not want their children to have Israel passports; others are divorced mothers who cannot get their ex-husband’s permission to apply for a passport.

Roman Pogorelov, who helps run the Facebook site, told the Jerusalem Post recently: “We are not talking about a leisure trip. We are talking about reuniting families, grandparents who have never met their grandchildren, people seeing old or dying relatives.”

Interior Ministry spokeswoman Sabine Hadad told the Post it was not a “new” law and the onus was on parents to comply.

“Any child born to an Israeli parent is Israeli,” she said. “While many Israeli parents in the past have not registered their children or taken out passports, they are still considered Israeli according to the law.”