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COVID: Can One Still Make Aliyah? (Or ‘Come, THEN Ask Permission to Stay’?)

Exceptional Circumstances for Entering Israel

UPDATE: See new additional exceptions issued on July 12

Since the beginning of the Corona crisis, foreigners have been banned from entering Israel. Throughout this period, Chaim V’Chessed has been heavily involved in obtaining permission for non-Israelis to enter Israel in certain situations. Our efforts on behalf of student visa families have been well documented.

There are numerous exceptional circumstances, in which non-Israeli citizens seek to enter the country. These include family members seeking to attend weddings of their siblings or children, mourners wishing to participate in the funerals of loved ones, and other life and death situations.

A constant challenge has been the lack of clearly delineated guidelines. Over the past few months, we have persistently entreated Interior Ministry officials to issue cogent guidelines, and preferably in English.

On Sunday June 14, the Interior Ministry finally responded with a one-page Hebrew document outlining the rules for exceptional entry permission. We continue to urge the Ministry to issue these guidelines in English, as well.

The Hebrew document can be viewed here.

Bear in mind, that is not sufficient to belong to one of these categories. One must receive written permission from the Foreign Ministry in order to enter Israel.

The following groups are addressed by these rules:

Foreign Spouses of Israeli Citizens:

Foreign spouses of Israeli citizens may receive permission to enter Israel.

However, the Israeli citizen must also be a current resident of Israel. If he/she holds Israeli citizenship but currently resides abroad, the spouse will not receive permission.

Furthermore, we have seen that authorities commonly require that the couple be listed as married in the Israeli Population Registry. A foreign marriage certificate is often insufficient. This has created difficulties for Israelis who have recently married foreigners abroad, near or during the Corona crisis. These couples have no way to register their marriages with Israel (consulates and embassies are closed), and hence, their applications are frequently denied. We are working with government officials to resolve this issue.

Relatives Attending Weddings in Israel:

A chassan or kalla marrying an Israeli citizen, as well as their parents, grandparents and siblings can obtain permission to enter Israel. Please note: Chaim V’Chessed has learned that permission is not granted to brother or sisters in law.

Relatives Attending Funerals in Israel:

Mourners may travel to Israel for the funeral or shiva of immediate relatives. Here too, we have found that permission is often not granted to in-law children. However, the rules state plainly that mourners and their spouses can be allowed to enter.

While all travelers must quarantine for fourteen days upon arrival in Israel, permission can be obtained from the Health Ministry to attend the funeral.

Furthermore, despite the fourteen-day quarantine requirement, the Health Ministry sometimes grants permission for mourners to enter the country for a very short time, up to 48 hours, and to leave immediately thereafter.

Olim Chadashim:

People in the process of making aliya are permitted to enter Israel. However, here too, there are numerous complications. With governmental offices shuttered across the globe, many basic documents needed for aliya are unobtainable. Nefesh B’Nefesh, with whom we work closely with, is making great efforts to alleviate some of these difficulties.

Applications for these exceptional circumstances must be made through your nearest Israeli embassy or consulate. For a complete list of Israeli outposts, see here.

From Chaim V’Chessed, here.

American BLM Riots Even Worse Than You Thought…

Stop pretending the BLM protests were peaceful

Are journalists deliberately ignoring the effects of these devastating riots?

BY 
July 16, 2020

Having spent the past month traveling around the United States — from major cities to the countryside — the scale of the ‘movement’ which erupted in late May after the death of George Floyd is almost incomprehensible. According to the New York Times, which relays their finding with obvious excitement, the ‘movement’ (its precise contours seldom defined) “may be the largest” in U.S. history.

That is certainly plausible. In which case, it would presumably be important to document how ordinary Americans, especially those most directly affected, perceive the “movement” in question.

Scan almost any of the popular media coverage over the past six weeks and you’ll find that journalists have been steadfast in their depiction of “protesters” as unassailably “peaceful.” While the vast majority of those who attended a state-backed demonstration or some other event spurred by the ‘movement’ are unlikely to have committed any acts of physical destruction, the term “peaceful protest” doesn’t seem to quite capture the impact of a society-wide upheaval that included, as a key component, mass riots — the magnitude of which have not been seen in the U.S. since at least the 1960s.

From large metro areas like Chicago and Minneapolis/St. Paul, to small and mid-sized cities like Fort Wayne, Indiana and Green Bay, Wisconsin, the number of boarded up, damaged or destroyed buildings I have personally observed — commercial, civic, and residential — is staggering. Keeping exact count is impossible. One might think that a major media organisation such as the New York Times would use some of their galactic journalistic resources to tally up the wreckage for posterity. But roughly six weeks later, and such a tally is still nowhere to be found.

A standard retort one often hears is that “the riots” must not be conflated with “the protests,” which is technically accurate in certain contexts. But the distinction is not as obvious as the media like to make out. In many locations, police and fire services were diverted to accommodate these massive protests, which in turn created a vacuum that enabled the outbreak of riotous activity. As one resident of Minneapolis explained to me, emergency services told him that they would simply be unavailable during the weekend of 29-31 May, while other locals recounted with amazement that police were totally absent as their neighbourhoods burned.

In Milwaukee, a man described being chased down by rioters after getting off the bus on his way home from work. He saw no difference between protesters and rioters; the flippant idea that these groups can be so neatly disentangled is wrong.

This view is just as likely to be espoused by black people and other minorities as anyone else (the Milwaukee man was black), which renders the media’s strident insistence to depict the ‘movement’ as entirely peaceful incongruous with the perceptions of working-class Americans (of all races). So many of them experienced what transpired more as a painful tragedy than any kind of wondrous harmony.

Indeed, the resulting destruction may have set their majority-minority neighbourhoods back economically for months or years, if not longer. Most had already been struggling due to the pandemic, with the riots interrupting fragile reopening plans. To exclude the perspectives of these people from popular media narratives amounts to a kind of purposefully obfuscatory, moralising snobbery. Talk about ‘erasure’.

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From Unherd, here.

Corona: Israeli State Lying With Statistics

You Can’t Trust The Numbers or the Government That Relies on Them

24 Tammuz 5780

The numbers being quoted in the media are completely useless for determining the true scope of the pandemic in Israel.  And yet the politicians are threatening the citizens with all kinds of punitive measures based on the situation as perceived through these skewed statistics.  We’ve already seen people harassed on the streets by the police; whole neighborhoods locked down; people forced to leave home and go to “coronavirus hotels.”  Limits on activities have already been renewed with promises of High Holy Days being a repeat of Pesach and threats of synagogue and yeshivah closures once again.The inmates who have taken charge of the asylum tout “record” numbers of infected and “record” numbers of serious cases, but it is impossible to get a true accounting of the real numbers as the reports are contradictory depending on where you look for them.  (For example today’s count of new cases was either 1200+ or 1500+ depending on where you were looking.)Recently, I quoted Dr. Yoav Yehezkelli who said: “What matters is not the total number of patients, but the number of severe illnesses and intubated patients. As long as these figures are under control, the situation is good.”

The constantly increasing number of overall cases is clearly the result of increased testing [Health Ministry said set to reduce testing as system overwhelmed by outbreak – Asymptomatic people won’t be checked; Israeli HMOs warn they’ll start ‘throwing away’ virus tests due to overload]  but now the reported number of “severe” illnesses has more than doubled since then.  And that is explained here:

Israel’s recent rise in serious COVID-19 cases partly due to change in criteria – Doctors at Israel’s largest hospital amended their approach to categorizing virus patients, impacting national stats; goal is to standardize criteria, they say, not inflate figures.

However, that’s exactly what happened.  Despite the seeming worsening of the pandemic in Israel in a so-called “second wave,” the mortality rate remains relatively low.  But even those numbers can’t be taken at face value as the Israeli media is reporting 375 deaths as a result of COVID-19 as of today’s date, while the WHO makes it 364.

Whom do we believe?  There is no way to know how the dead are being counted as many countries have admitted to decisions and practices which skews those numbers as well.  Either way, the figure remains relatively low.  Even taking the higher figure of 375, that averages out to 2.5 persons per day (since Feb 21 when counts began).

By comparison, in 2016, the most recent date I can find for statistics, there were a total of 35,717 deaths from all causes in the over-65 age group (those determined to be most at risk from COVID-19).That’s an average of 97.8 persons per day.

The reason our perception of this pandemic is so out of touch with reality is because at no other time have the media and the government ever reported on daily deaths from any other cause.  I also have to wonder why the number of ventilated patients is still rising when ventilator-assisted breathing has been determined by many credible medical sources to be a cause of higher mortality.  (See Are Ventilators Making Some COVID-19 Patients Worse? and Why Ventilators May Not Be Working as Well for COVID-19 Patients as Doctors Hoped.)

This was shared today on Facebook.  It is genius.

Continue reading…

From Tomer Devorah, here.