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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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.

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British Prime Minister Keir Starmer and US President Donald Trump (not pictured) hold a bilateral meeting at Trump Turnberry golf course in Turnberry, Scotland, Britain, July 28, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein

A spokesperson for the British government said on Tuesday that it is “saddened” by Maccabi Tel Aviv’s decision to decline tickets for an upcoming match in the UK, following a local police order banning fans of the Israeli club from attending the game next month.

“We are deeply saddened Maccabi Tel Aviv have turned down their away fan allocation but we respect their right to do so,” the spokesperson said. “It is completely unacceptable that this game has been weaponized to stoke violence and fear by those who seek to divide us. We will never tolerate antisemitism or extremism on our streets.”

Government officials in Israel and the UK, including British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, condemned the decision by Birmingham’s Safety Advisory Group (SAG), in collaboration with West Midlands Police, to ban Maccabi fans from a Nov. 6 match against Aston Villa at Villa Park in Birmingham because of “public safety concerns outside the stadium bowl and the ability to deal with any potential protests on the night.”

In a statement on Monday, Maccabi said the “toxic atmosphere” puts the safety of its fans at risk. “The wellbeing and safety of our fans is paramount and from hard lessons learned, we have taken the decision to decline any allocation offered on behalf of away fans and our decision should be understood in that context,” the team said. “We hope that circumstances will change and look forward to being able to play in Birmingham in a sporting environment in the near future.”

In November 2024, Maccabi fans were violently assaulted in a premeditated and coordinated attack following a soccer game in Amsterdam between the soccer team and the Dutch club Ajax.

The Israeli soccer team in its statement on Monday acknowledged efforts by the British government and police to ensure that its fans can attend the Nov. 6 match safely, “and are grateful for the messages of support from across the footballing community and society at large.”

“We as a club believe that football should be about bringing people together, not driving them apart, and no one should feel unsafe for simply wanting to come and support their team nor feel any hesitation about being accompanied by family and friends,” the team added. “Our fans regularly travel all over Europe without incident and to suggest that the reason our fans cannot be allowed to travel is due to their behavior is an attempt to distort reality and to excuse the real underlying reasons for the decision to ban our fans. Our fans, the Jewish community know all too well this tactic and all are too familiar with where it can lead.”

On Sunday, a soccer match in Israel between Maccabi Tel Aviv and Hapoel Tel Aviv was abruptly canceled after soccer fans threw smoke grenades and pyrotechnics devices onto the field and injured dozens of people, including police officers. Rioting soccer fans outside of the stadium, who were upset about cancellation, threw bottles and assaulted police officers. Maccabi said Hapoel fans were responsible for the disorderly conduct that led to the game being called off.