In my post about the flight home I touched the edge of the bureaucracy – and promised details. So here they are: the full route from the moment of birth until your baby is registered as your child in Israel too. It sounds scary, but once you know the order of steps – it's mostly a to-do list. A long one, but a list. And one important point right at the start: contrary to what many parents think, most of the Israeli part is completed today after returning home, from Israel – not at a consulate in the U.S.
Step one, in the U.S. – the American documents: as part of the U.S. legal process, a parentage judgment (or parentage order) is issued – note, not to be confused with the Israeli "judicial parentage order" (tzav horut pesikati), a separate Israeli proceeding I'll cover in the next post. By force of that judgment, an American birth certificate is issued after the birth with your names as parents. Some states issue such a judgment before the birth (a pre-birth order), some only after the birth (a post-birth order), and in some states you can request both a pre-birth and a post-birth judgment.
Order several certified copies – you'll need them for the U.S. passport, the Israeli process, and countless future occasions. Guard copies of the judgment itself carefully too: it is the document that establishes parentage and terminates the surrogate's legal status, and the Israeli courts will ask to see it. Also make sure to obtain an apostille for both the birth certificate and the judgment in the U.S. And if you hold additional citizenships – you'll need apostilles for those as well, and it's worth checking in advance whether those countries require specific wording to appear in the judgment.
Step two: the baby's U.S. passport. Thanks to birthright citizenship (I covered this at length in my citizenship post), the process is relatively quick and can be expedited for a fee. That passport is your baby's ticket into Israel – with it the baby flies and enters the country, even before Israeli status is settled. And don't forget to obtain Israel's electronic travel authorization – ETA-IL – for the baby's American passport; it applies to every traveler entering on a foreign passport, regardless of age.
Step three, in Israel – the legal process: for the baby to be registered as your child and receive Israeli status, the genetic link to the biological parent must be proven through a DNA (tissue) test conducted in Israel, with the approval of the Family Court and according to the protocol it sets. The petition is filed by an Israeli attorney specializing in the field, and you can – and should – prepare it during the pregnancy, so that when you land, everything is already in motion. Once the results are in, a judgment recognizing parentage is issued, and with it you complete registration at the Interior Ministry: the population registry, the ID appendix, and later an Israeli passport.
And what about the consulate? There is also a route of starting the process at an Israeli consulate in the U.S., but in practice only a small minority of families uses it – the vast majority simply flies home on the American passport and completes everything in Israel, which is also the simpler route in most cases. If your circumstances are special, that's a question for your Israeli attorney – it's not the default.
How long does it take? The U.S. stay is determined mainly by the American passport and the baby's recovery – usually a few weeks. The Israeli part continues after your return, and its length depends on court workloads and the quality of early preparation. The difference between a smooth process and a stuck one is almost always preparation: an attorney engaged in advance, organized documents, an Israeli attorney familiar with both the American proceeding and the documents required for the Israeli one, and a petition ready to file.
My tip: open one tracking table (we live in spreadsheets, what can you do) with every document: what was issued, how many copies, where each copy physically is. In the moments when a clerk or court requests "another original copy" – that table is worth gold.
