No One Ever Said Dual Citizenship Was Simple

September 14, 2006 - 10:34 PM by

It’s a ritual that every U.S. immigrant to Israel goes through when they have children: the pilgrimage to the consulate to register them as American citizens. Dotcodotil walks us through it.

When you have a mixed marriage, sometimes you pay the price later. Today that price was paid spending four hours at the lovely American consulate in East Jerusalem.

Like me, Mrs Co.Il comes from the land that is red, white and blue but instead of having six stars on her flag she has 50.

We are going to be going to the States for Succot and need to register YM as someone born abroad as well as getting her American passport.

So we trekked to East Jersualem at 7.30 in the morning and took our place in the queue. My first impressions that we had landed on the set of 24. Reasons for this was all the two cheeked kisses.

Luckily Mrs Co.Il was incredibly organized and after having been to the Interior Ministry earlier in the week had every piece of documentation we needed.

After speaking to the attendant on the outside we were told to wait outside until we would be called one at a time. Went inside and then through two metal detectors where we found ourselves in a small waiting room. Small is the operative word as if there are too many people in there they don’t let any more people in.

After a while we were called up where Mrs Co.Il produced her phone book size stack of documents. He ticked off everything except we didn’t have our original marriage certificate, just copies. The original must have got mixed up with the Interior Ministry stuff.

So I had to go back home and get it. Into a cab, run upstairs, get back into the cab and then return to the scene of the crime. When I got back there was almost a party going on with a couple from our birth classes as well as married friends of ours.

I produced the marriage certificate and all that did was allow us to proceed to Step 4h of the process which was to examine the evidence that Mrs Co.Il was a resident of the USA for a number of years before she was 14 as well as a couple of years after.

So what evidence did we present?
School Transcripts.
School Yearbooks.
Certificate from School that Mrs Co.Il was a Mitzvah Girl.
Birth Certificate of Mrs Co.Il’s Cabbage Patch Doll.
School Chessed of the Week award
Library Card.
Blockbuster Card.
Subway Ticket from 1991.
Ticket Stub to Cats.

With such great documentation it was a matter of case closed and we were on our way.

Now when it comes to giving her an Australian passport, it’s far easier. All she has to do is eat a Vegemite sandwich.

Tags: • Category: Immigrant Moments 

Comments

3 Comments on No One Ever Said Dual Citizenship Was Simple

  1. David on Fri, Sep 15th 2006 1:14 AM

    2. And the purpose of registering the children as foreigners is??

    So much for the zionism of these people. Do they commit to Israel or at the back of their minds, in the deep recesses, they secretly believe that one day Israel may fail and their “American” children will be taken safe and sound into Christian America?

    At the end of the day, Israel was established by non-religious Jews, who were mostly socialist and did not have doubt about Israel.

    Unfortunately today, Israel has an addiction to American aid. This is a crisis and it is high time the Netanyahu plan to shake off this shackle of shekels is revived.

  2. Gilly on Sun, Sep 17th 2006 7:19 PM

    3. For those who don’t like vegemite, eating a whole sandwich would be far more difficult!!

    Shana Tova,

    Gilly

  3. Rebecca on Sun, Sep 17th 2006 9:03 PM

    4. David,

    Don’t be such a wet blanket. How can you read Dot Co’s mind and imagine you know what his devotion to Zionism is?

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