(JTA) — When Isabella Vinci stepped out of the mikvah on Nov. 11, 2021, she thought she had done everything that would be required to become Jewish. A beit din, or rabbinic court, had approved her conversion after nearly a year of study with Rabbi Andrue Kahn at Temple Emanu-El, a Reform congregation in New York, including a congregational course and one-on-one meetings.

Within a year, she visited Israel on Birthright and returned on an immersion program to teach English in an Orthodox public school in Netanya. Friends, rabbis and colleagues, she said, embraced her as Jewish.

Israel’s Population and Immigration Authority did not.

In a pair of decisions issued in January and again last month, immigration officials rejected Vinci’s application for aliyah under the Law of Return and then denied her administrative appeal.

The letters point to two main problems: She studied for conversion online during the COVID period, and she did not prove sufficient post-conversion participation in a synagogue community — particularly while living in Israel.

Vinci, 31, had to leave behind the life she had built in Tel Aviv and move back to the United States. She is now preparing a court petition with the Israel Religious Action Center, the legal‐advocacy arm of Reform Judaism in Israel.

For decades, IRAC and other non-Orthodox advocacy groups have complained about attempts by religious parties in Israel to block the recognition of conversions outside of Orthodoxy. But Vinci’s advocates say she was blocked from citizenship despite a Supreme Court ruling from 2005 allowing overseas conversions, regardless of denomination.

Her rejection also reflects a gap between the Diaspora and Israel, they say, in everything from religious practice to the adaptations made necessary by the pandemic.

“The whole world — from rabbis to strangers who hear my story — tells me I am Jewish. They see that I am putting everything on the line to be a part of our people. The only ones telling me that I’m not Jewish are within this government agency,” Vinci said in an interview, describing months of silence and what she felt was the government’s unwillingness to consider new supporting documents. “Why aren’t they putting in the work and the effort to actually understand where I’m coming from?”

Vinci grew up Catholic in a sprawling, multicultural family, spending early years in Florida and most of her childhood in Omaha, Neb. She never felt rooted in the church and developed her own spirituality as a teen. Jewish relatives and friends were part of her orbit, and she felt increasingly drawn to the religion.

When she moved to New York as an adult, she decided to become a Jew, going through Temple Emanu-El in Manhattan, one of the most prominent congregations of Reform Judaism.

Neither the immigration authority nor the Interior Ministry, which oversees it, responded to a request for comment.

But official responses Vinci received show that decisions in her case zero in on whether her path fits internal regulations drawn up in 2014 to vet conversions performed abroad. The Israeli Supreme Court ruled in 2005 that such conversions, regardless of denomination, must be recognized, leaving it to the ministry to set criteria.

Those rules anticipate in-person study anchored in a congregation; if the course is “outside” the congregation, they require a longer, 18-month track. In Vinci’s case, officials treated her 2020-2021 Zoom coursework as external and concluded she hadn’t met the time or community-involvement thresholds.

IRAC’s legal director for new immigrants, attorney Nicole Maor, appealed the initial rejection, sending in a detailed memo. Maor wrote that congregational classes conducted on Zoom during a pandemic should be considered congregational, rather than external. She argued that the criteria’s purpose is to prevent fictitious conversions — not to penalize sincere candidates who followed their synagogue’s rules during COVID.

“The entire purpose of the criteria is to protect against the abuse of the conversion process. A person who converted in 2021, came to Israel on a Masa program to contribute to Israel in 2022-2023, and stayed in Israel to work and support the country in its most difficult hour after Oct. 7 deserves better and more sympathetic treatment,” she wrote.

She also wrote that the ministry had ignored evidence of Vinci’s Jewish communal life in Israel, from school prayer with students to weekly Orthodox Shabbat meals with a host family.

As part of Vinci’s appeal packet, Kahn submitted a letter describing the cadence of Vinci’s studies: roughly five months in Temple Emanu-El’s Intro to Judaism course alongside his own one-on-one meetings beginning Dec. 21, 2020, and continuing “1-3 times a month for 2-3 hours” until her November 2021 conversion — about 11 months in total. He listed key books and practices he assigned and attested to her active participation in synagogue young-adult programming.

A host family in Netanya provided a letter saying Vinci spent “Shabbat with our family every weekend as well as most holidays,” describing a year of Orthodox observance in their home and an ongoing relationship since she moved to Tel Aviv after Masa. The school where she taught also wrote in support.

The ministry was unmoved.

In an interview, Maor, who handles a large caseload of prospective immigrants, said Vinci’s case is emblematic of a larger phenomenon.

“It’s not just bureaucracy,” Maor said. “There’s a recurring theme — a suspicious attitude at the ministry that has become worse in recent years and makes life much more difficult for converts.”

Vinci’s case sits at the fault line between Diaspora practice after COVID and Israeli bureaucracy. Around the world, Reform and Conservative congregations shifted classes, and in some communities, services, to Zoom. Many have retained hybrid models because they work for busy or far-flung learners.

“This reality has led to a widening gap between how Diaspora congregations operate and the demands of the Interior Ministry,” Maor said.

There is also a philosophical mismatch: For the ministry, involvement in the Jewish community post-conversion appears to mean synagogue membership and attendance logs. For non-Orthodox streams, Maor said, Jewish life can be expressed in multiple ways — home ritual, learning circles, social-justice work — especially in Israel, where Jewish rhythms permeate public life.

In Vinci’s Netanya year, that life included like daily school prayer, holidays with an observant host family, and teaching in a religious environment. Maor argues that should count.

Kahn, who says two of his other converts have made aliyah without incident, said he was saddened by Vinci’s rejection given her devotion and the hoops she jumped through to satisfy paperwork and timelines.

“It wasn’t like she was mucking around in Israel, she was really doing the work and legitimately devoted to being Jewish,” he said.

After losing her legal status and appeal, Vinci returned to the United States. She took a legal-assistant job in Kansas City and is scraping together fees to file a court petition.

Maor won’t predict the outcome, but she said often cases settle before a precedent is set. The state agrees to a compromise such as additional months of study, rather than risk a ruling that forces a policy shift.

Vinci hopes the case determines not only where she celebrates the next set of holidays, but also improves how Israel treats a growing cohort of would-be immigrants whose Jewish journeys began on a laptop during a once-in-a-century shutdown and amid rising antisemitism.

“I hope my story sheds light on inter-community love and acceptance,” she said. “In our current political and social climate, the best thing we can do is be united as one.”

The post After three years in Israel, Reform convert told she can’t make aliyah appeared first on The Forward.

(JTA) — Vice President JD Vance arrived in Israel Tuesday, telling reporters that he felt “very optimistic” that the ceasefire between Hamas and Israel would hold despite Israel’s strikes over the weekend in Gaza following the deaths of two soldiers.

“We are one week into President Trump’s historic peace plan in the Middle East, and things are going, frankly, better than I expected that they were,” Vance told reporters. He spoke alongside U.S. Special Envoy to the Middle East Steve Witkoff and administration adviser Jared Kushner, who helped broker the deal.

Vance is expected to meet with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu Wednesday. The visit marked Vance’s first time in Israel as vice president.

“We will talk about two things, mainly the security challenges and the diplomatic opportunities we face,” Netanyahu said in a speech to the Knesset Monday about his planned meeting with Vance. “We will overcome the challenges and seize the opportunities.”

During his opening remarks at the new Civilian Military Co-operation Center in southern Israel, Vance also accused the “American media” of having a “desire to root for failure” when there are lapses in the ceasefire rollout, appearing to reference Israel’s strikes in Gaza on Sunday.

“Every time that there’s an act of violence, there’s this inclination to say, ‘Oh, this is the end of the ceasefire,’” said Vance. “It’s not the end. It is, in fact, exactly how this is going to have to happen when you have people who hate each other, who have been fighting against each other for a very long time. We are doing very well. We are in a very good place.”

Vance added that his presence in Israel had “nothing to do with events in the past 48 hours,” and said he had come to “put some eyes” on the negotiations and report back to President Donald Trump.

On Tuesday morning, Trump wrote on Truth Social that the United States’ allies in the Middle East would “welcome the opportunity” to “go into GAZA with a heavy force and ‘straighten out Hamas’ if Hamas continues to act badly, in violation of their agreement with us.” (The two Israeli soldiers in Gaza were not killed by Hamas, according to Israel and Hamas.)

“I told these countries, and Israel, ‘NOT YET!’ There is still hope that Hamas will do what is right. If they do not, an end to Hamas will be FAST, FURIOUS, & BRUTAL!,” Trump’s post continued.

While all of the 20 living hostages in Gaza were released by Hamas on Oct. 13, the slow pace of the return of the remaining deceased hostages has spurred frustration among Israelis. At least 13 bodies have been returned to Israel thus far, and two more are scheduled to be returned Tuesday evening.

When asked by a reporter at the press conference Tuesday if the United States would impose a deadline on Hamas for the release of the remaining hostages, Vance urged “patience.”

“This is not going to happen overnight. Some of these hostages are buried under thousands of pounds of rubble. Some of the hostages nobody even knows where they are,” said Vance. “That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t work to get them, and that  doesn’t mean we don’t have confidence that we will, it’s just a reason to counsel in favor of a little bit of patience.”

Later, when asked by a reporter how much time Hamas has to lay down its weapons before the U.S. military intervenes, Vance declined to set a strict deadline.

“We know that Hamas has to comply with the deal, and if Hamas doesn’t comply with the deal, very bad things are going to happen,” said Vance. “But I’m not going to do what the President of the United States has thus far refused to do, which is put an explicit deadline on it, because a lot of this stuff is difficult. A lot of this stuff is unpredictable.”

Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, said that there had been “surprisingly strong coordination” between the United Nations and Israel on delivering humanitarian aid into Gaza, and that plans to help rebuild the enclave were underway.

“There are considerations happening now in the area that the IDF controls, as long as that can be secured, to start the construction as a new Gaza, in order to give the Palestinians living in Gaza a place to go, a place to get jobs, a place to live,” said Kushner.

Vance, who is scheduled to remain in Israel until Thursday, also emphasized that U.S. troops would not be on the ground in Gaza and that they were working towards establishing an “international security force” in the region.

“Right now, I feel very optimistic. Can I say with 100% certainty that it’s going to work? No, but you don’t do difficult things by only doing what’s 100% certain, you do difficult things by trying,” said Vance.

The post JD Vance arrives in Israel as ceasefire totters: ‘We are in a very good place’ appeared first on The Forward.

Families of American victims of Palestinian terrorism filed a federal lawsuit in the US this week against the Palestinian Authority (PA) and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) over their “pay-for-slay” program, which finances deadly terrorist attacks.

Palestinian terrorist groups, which have long been riddled with accusations of corruption, have carried out for years a so-called “pay-for-slay” program, which rewards terrorists and their families for carrying out attacks against Israelis.

Under this policy, official payments are made to Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli jails, the families of “martyrs” killed in attacks on Israelis, and Palestinians injured in terrorist attacks.

Reports estimate that approximately 8 percent of Palestinian terror groups’ budget is allocated to paying stipends to convicted terrorists and their families.

Filed in New York on behalf of Stuart Force and Hananel Gez, this new lawsuit aims to hold the PA and the PLO accountable for financing terrorism.

Stuart Force is the father of Taylor Force, a US Army captain and Vanderbilt MBA student who was killed in a terrorist attack in Tel Aviv in March 2016.

Hananel Gez was the victim of another terror attack earlier this year while driving his wife, Tzeela Gez, to the hospital to give birth. His wife was fatally shot, and their newborn son, Ravid Haim Gez, died two weeks later. Hananel was also injured in the attack.

The families said they were seeking compensatory damages to be determined at trial, along with a court order barring the PLO and the PA from making payments to Palestinian terrorists or their families.

Earlier this year, PA President Mahmoud Abbas announced plans to reform the system, as the group seeks international support for a role in Gaza’s governance after the war.

However, the terror group continues providing payments to terrorists and their families, despite repeated promises of reform to Western governments, with amounts rising based on the severity of the attack and the length of prison sentences.

This new lawsuit draws on the legal precedent set by the Fuld v. PLO case in June, which made it possible for American victims of terrorism to pursue compensation for attacks carried out abroad.

Two other pieces of legislation also set important legal precedent for this case: the 2018 Taylor Force Act, which withholds American aid until the PA stops making payments to terrorists, and the 2019 Promoting Security and Justice for Victims of Terrorism Act, which requires the PLO and PA to submit to US jurisdiction if they continue funding attacks.