Getting our Visas

At some time early in the planning stages, while on a trip to Chicago, we made an appointment with the Jewish Agency to get information on obtaining a work visa. They talked to us about our goals and recommended we apply for an A1 temporary resident visa. We filled out an application and over the course of a bunch of months, sent in all the require paperwork. Some of the requested documentation was harder to get than we expected and we turned it in rather last minute.

After turning in everything requested of us, we were told that they'd process it and have our Visas before our flight. Then we were informed that we had to fill out a whole different application and send it to someone at Nefesh B'nefesh who would then send it to the US Consulate. After doing all that, we were told that we had to overnight some more paperwork with our passports to the consulate in chicago. We found this out at around 5PM and the paperwork which had to be notarized, together with new passport photos had to be in by the next day. We ran to UPS, got the papers notarized then ran to fedex to get the passport pictured and ship the package.

We got to Fedex with 20 minuted to spare before the cutoff time for express packages, but they said they couldn't take passport pictures for at least 15 minutes and it wouldn't print in time. They directed us to another Fedex location, that had a 8:00 cutoff time, the latest in the state. We ran over there and they said they couldn't take passport pictures for the baby, because they never come out. I talked the lady into doing it anyway and she patiently spent 15 minutes trying to get a picture with him sitting still (they required him to sit in a chair and look straight at the camera). Finally we finished taking the pictures and what do you know, the printer died and they couldn't print them. We were now down to 30 minutes until cutoff time. We ran down the block to CVS who refused to take pictures for the baby and then to Walgreens who said 'no problem". They had a much smarter systems for taking baby passport pictures; they lay the background down on a counter and let the baby lie down on it. The photo guy kept having to leave to help an elderly customer, but eventually got all our pictures and sent them to the printer, which seemed to take forever. We finally got them and sped back to Fedex, arriving 3 minutes before cutoff!

Two days later we received our passports back with the wrong visas! This was on Thursday, 6 days before our flight and the consulate was closed the next Monday for MLK day. This meant that if we overnighted the passports back to the consulate and they didn't send them back on Friday, we would not have passports in time for our flight. I thought this was a crazy risk, not to mention expensive. I preferred to get on our flights and get visas in Israel (which is basically what happened in the end). my wife disagreed, she didn't want to deal with the Israeli Bureaucracy, so we overnighted them back with a return envelope with overnight saturday delivery. By some miracle we got our passports with the correct visas on shabbos. Only to find out later, that the whole visa was issued incorrectly and we had to reapply, but more on that later.

Angry Passport Photo