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After three years in Israel, Reform convert told she can’t make aliyah
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 in 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,” Vince 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.
Temple Emanu-El on the Upper East Side of Manhattan is one of the largest Reform congregations in the world and the oldest in New York. (Courtesy Temple Emanu-El)
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.”
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I helped sell Obama’s Iran deal. Its critics owe us all an explanation.
(JTA) — Neoconservatives have some ‘splainin’ to do, as Lucy’s television husband, Ricky Ricardo used to say.
The war on Iran has turned out to be a debacle of historic proportions.
After months of military escalation, tens of billions of dollars expended, critical weapons stockpiles depleted, and a region once again thrown into crisis, the United States now finds itself humiliated. The memorandum of understanding reportedly concluded last week does not represent the culmination of victory. It represents the codification of failure.
Many understood that nuclear disarmament and regime change in Iran could not be achieved through force. As I wrote in these pages a few months ago, more than a decade ago, we reached a solution designed to avert precisely the calamity that has unfolded. It was the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or, in layman’s parlance, the Iran nuclear deal.
As a certified denizen of the Swamp — I served in the Clinton White House’s communications shop and later founded a Washington, DC strategic communications firm — I was at the forefront of selling the Obama administration’s agreement to the American public.
I remember those days well — and I do not miss them.
JCPOA defenders, particularly those of us in the Jewish community, were attacked in the ugliest terms imaginable. We were called appeasers, sellouts, self-hating Jews and worse. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu traveled to Washington and outrageously warned Congress that the deal might pave the way to a second Holocaust.
JCPOA advocates never argued that the agreement signed in Vienna was perfect.
Its critics pointed to the sunset provisions. They objected that the deal did not address every malign activity undertaken by the Islamic Republic throughout the Middle East. These were legitimate concerns. Politics, however, is the art of the possible; geopolitics doubly so.
That agreement nevertheless achieved something extraordinary. Iran shipped out the overwhelming majority of its enriched uranium. International inspectors gained unprecedented access. A mechanism existed to monitor and constrain Tehran’s nuclear ambitions. The prospect of military confrontation receded.
The regime’s hardliners hated the agreement. The Revolutionary Guard fought it tooth and nail. Integration into the global economy threatened entrenched interests within the Islamic Republic. A growing middle class and increasing international engagement carried risks for those whose power depended on its isolation and perpetual confrontation.
Unfortunately, hardliners were not confined to Tehran.
The maximal-pressure advocates in Washington ultimately prevailed. During the first Trump administration, the United States withdrew from the agreement. Tore it up, as the president bragged. Despite the best efforts of our European partners, who had also signed the accord, the framework collapsed beneath the weight of renewed sanctions and diplomatic abandonment.
What followed, we were promised, was supposed to vindicate the critics.
Instead, it vindicated the critics’ critics.
The maximal-pressure advocates have spent years moving the goalposts. First, we were told, sanctions would bring the regime to its knees. They did not. Then economic isolation would force Tehran to abandon its nuclear ambitions. It did not. Then military pressure would succeed where sanctions had failed. It did not. Then leadership decapitation, covert action, and military escalation would produce regime change. They did not.
Each promised but failed breakthrough gave way to another promised breakthrough.
And now comes the final indignity: the so-called memorandum of understanding.
After years of threats, sanctions, covert action, military escalation and open warfare, the United States has agreed to resume negotiations with the very regime it set out to break. The Islamic Republic remains in power. Its leadership and political system remain intact.
Nor is that all.
The agreement reportedly provides waivers for Iranian oil exports and opens the door to sanctions relief and renewed access to many billions in frozen assets. It establishes yet another negotiating process on the nuclear question rather than resolving it. It leaves unresolved many of the issues that maximal-pressure advocates once described as non-negotiable, including Iran’s missile capabilities, its regional proxy network, or the many canisters of near-bomb-grade enriched uranium — what the president calls nuclear dust.
Even the future status of the Strait of Hormuz, the critical passage for oil open before the war, and now established as a lever for Iran to exert pressure, appears destined for further negotiation rather than decisive resolution.
The advocates of maximal pressure promised a better deal than the JCPOA. They promised that Iran would be forced to make concessions unavailable through diplomacy.
Instead, after years of confrontation, Washington finds itself lifting pressure, restoring economic benefits, negotiating with a surviving regime and postponing the most difficult questions to future talks.
Hell, in Paris last week, Trump actually made the case for Iran to retain, build or buy missiles and maintain at least some nuclear power.
So, what, precisely, was achieved?
The tragedy is not merely that the war failed to accomplish its objectives. It is that we already possessed a framework that constrained Iran’s nuclear program without requiring military confrontation. The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action was imperfect, to be sure. Its supporters never claimed otherwise. But it reduced risk, established verification mechanisms and avoided precisely the cycle of escalation that has consumed the past decade.
Its opponents insisted there was a better way.
History has now rendered its verdict.
The United States ultimately abandoned a functioning diplomatic framework in pursuit of fantasies that proved unattainable. Having exhausted sanctions, threats and military force, it has arrived back at the negotiating table poorer, weaker and in possession of less leverage than before.
I’m afraid I told you so.
The defenders of the JCPOA were mocked as appeasers. Yet the memorandum of understanding now before us amounts to an admission of the very proposition we advanced all along: However distasteful it may be, the Islamic Republic is not a problem that can be bombed or sanctioned out of existence.
Diplomacy could have spared us the war.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post I helped sell Obama’s Iran deal. Its critics owe us all an explanation. appeared first on The Forward.
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Lander unseats Goldman on winning congressional election night for Mamdani
Former City Comptroller Brad Lander handily defeated incumbent Rep. Dan Goldman in the New York Democratic primary Tuesday night, while lesser-known Assemblymember Claire Valdez secured the nomination for another House seat — both after campaigning as sharp critics of Israel and with the endorsement of Mayor Zohran Mamdani.
Preliminary results showed Lander with about 66% of the vote to Goldman’s 34%. Valdez won with 56% of the vote for the open seat being vacated by Rep. Nydia Velazquez. Both are virtually assured of winning the general election in November in their heavily Democratic districts.
A third candidate whom Mamdani had endorsed, former Columbia Gaza war encampment organizer Darializa Avila Chevalier, held a slight lead over Rep. Adriano Espaillat on Tuesday night.
Representing a spectrum ranging from liberal Zionist critic (Lander) to longtime activist for the Palestinian cause (Avila Chevalier), the strong results for Mamdani’s chosen candidates is being closely watched nationally in a Democratic Party where many voters say they want the U.S. to distance itself from Israel. All three candidates say they will support cutting off U.S. military aid to Israel, including for the Iron Dome defense system.
At a campaign rally last week, Mamdani compared the American Israel Public Affairs Committee to “monsters” who “move millions in dark money to accomplish a single goal — to preserve their power, so that they can turn us against one another.” The remarks drew widespread condemnation from Jewish leaders, including some Mamdani supporters.
Lander is a high-profile Jewish politician allied with Mamdani, who this election cycle threw his weight behind a slate of progressive candidates who have critiqued hardline pro-Israel money and use the terms “genocide” and “apartheid” to describe Israel’s actions in Gaza and the West Bank.
Setting out to challenge the incumbent, Lander zeroed in on Goldman’s support for U.S. military aid to Israel and his past ties to the campaign fundraising group AIPAC during the campaign.
Lander told the New York Times that criticizing AIPAC makes him “queasy” given “the antisemitic tropes at play,” but that he feels an obligation to call out its funding nonetheless as he promises to curtail U.S. military aid to Israel.
In NY-7, another candidate backed by Mamdani defeated the incumbent’s handpicked successor. democratic socialist Valdez won against Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso, who had the endorsement of outgoing Rep. Velázquez.
But Mamdani’s brand of Israel politics didn’t succeed everywhere: In the Bronx, Rep. Ritchie Torres — one of the Democratic party’s most staunch supporters of Israel — handily defeated Michael Blake, a former state assemblyman who allied with Mamdani during the mayoral primary last year.
For state comptroller, incumbent Thomas DiNapoli — who made additional purchases of Israel bonds in the aftermath of Oct. 7 — won over Jewish challenger Drew Warshaw, who argued that the state should divest from Israel bonds because they help “finance Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s wars.”
State Assemblymember Micah Lasher won the race to succeed Rep. Jerry Nadler, who retired after 33 years in the House and served as one of Congress’ leading voices for liberal Jews. In that race, the leading candidates Lasher and Alex Bores had broad agreement in their support of Israel.
The other candidate in the race, Kennedy political scion Jack Schlossberg, had called for conditioning aid to Israel and attempted to draw contrast with Bores and Lasher on the issue. But Schlossberg’s campaign struggled to gain traction amid questions about his lack of political experience.
The post Lander unseats Goldman on winning congressional election night for Mamdani appeared first on The Forward.
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Pro-Israel Democrats battle to take on vulnerable Republican Rep. Mike Lawler
(New York Jewish Week) — Voters in New York’s Hudson Valley on Tuesday are choosing a Democrat to challenge the staunchly pro-Israel Republican Rep. Mike Lawler in a heavily Jewish swing district.
Two candidates have emerged as frontrunners in the Democratic primary in New York’s 17th Congressional District, a suburb of New York City that includes about 30,000 Orthodox Jews.
Cait Conley, a military veteran and former national security adviser, leads by double digits in polls this month and prediction markets over Beth Davidson, a member of the Rockland County Legislature who has highlighted her Jewish identity. A poll from Tavern Research last week found that 28% of voters were still undecided as the election approached.
Both are appealing to residents anxious about the cost of living, housing, healthcare and foreign conflicts. The winner will also aim to claw back moderate voters who supported Lawler, one of the most vocally pro-Israel members of Congress and a representative who has forged close ties with Orthodox Jewish voters.
Davidson and Conley have both said they support the United States alliance with Israel while opposing actions by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government. During a candidate forum in April, they distanced themselves from Democratic efforts in the Senate to block certain military sales to Israel.
Polling far behind Conley and Davidson is Effie Phillips-Staley, a progressive who says Israel is an apartheid state that has committed genocide in Gaza.
Conley and Davidson say they are marrying pro-Israel views with a liberal agenda, including fighting President Donald Trump. Davidson told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that she wants to create a political home for “Jews that have felt lost in the Democratic party.” She previously served on the board of her White Plains synagogue, Beth Am Shalom, and has touted Jewish values as driving her public service, including tikkun olam, or repairing the world, and welcoming the stranger.
Conley has presented her military experience as an advantage. A former national security adviser in the Biden administration, she has said that she supports a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and views Israel as a critical national security ally.
The winner will face off with Lawler, who has become so closely identified with the district’s Jewish community that he was recently attacked in comments by Sen. Rand Paul’s son, William Paul, who accused the lawmaker of being one of “you people,” although Lawler is not Jewish.
Often working with Democrats, Lawler has proposed a spate of legislation aimed at supporting Israel since he entered Congress in 2023. He co-sponsored the bipartisan Antisemitism Awareness Act, which would require the Department of Education to codify the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism, a move championed by major Jewish groups and criticized by progressives for classifying some forms of Israel criticism as antisemitic. The bill passed in the House in 2024 but stalled in the Senate amid free speech concerns and was reintroduced in the House last year.
Lawler also introduced in 2024 the bipartisan Stand with Israel Act, which seeks to halt funding for United Nations agencies that “expel, downgrade, suspend, or otherwise restrict the participation of the State of Israel.” His bipartisan 2025 Bunker Buster Act seeks to equip Israel with massive bombs to target Iran’s nuclear infrastructure.
This year, Lawler has partnered with Democrats on two new measures that he says will combat antisemitism. The Jewish American Security Act introduced this month proposes expanding federal security support for Jewish institutions, and a House resolution from April condemns leftist streamer Hasan Piker and far-right podcaster Candace Owens for “antisemitic hate-filled rhetoric and content.”
Phillips-Staley represents the rising progressive wing of the Democratic party that is sharply critical of Israel, differentiating herself from Lawler as well as Conley and Davidson. Phillips-Staley has said that her views solidified after she traveled to Israel and the West Bank in February. She was criticized by some Democratic officials for doing an interview with Piker.
She told JTA in March that many Jewish residents supported her belief that Israel has committed genocide and the United States should sever military aid.
“I get the most encouragement, from lots of people, but a lot of encouragement from Jews who really challenged me, especially in the beginning, to be brave and say it like it is,” said Philips-Staley.
Republicans are suspected of jumping into the late stage of the race by funding a shadowy new group called Progressive Champions PAC, which mirrors GOP efforts to influence other Democratic primaries nationwide. Davidson publicly disavowed the PAC, which has spent $1.5 million on ads attacking Conley for her contract work for an AI company that works with the Department of Homeland Security, according to the Cook Political Report.
The primary winner will quickly rocket to national prominence in the general election, as Lawler’s seat is considered one of the most likely to flip in November. Democrats outnumber Republicans in the district, which former presidential candidate Kamala Harris won by less than one percentage point in 2024.
The post Pro-Israel Democrats battle to take on vulnerable Republican Rep. Mike Lawler appeared first on The Forward.
