Editorial: Death of a bureaucracy

Issue of Sept. 5, 2008

The grinding bureaucracy encountered by new immigrants to Israel is the stuff of legend. G-d only knows how many potential olim simply never applied to the Jewish Agency for Israel for permission to emigrate because they found the prospect of such a grueling ordeal too daunting to consider seriously. In this age of Nefesh B’Nefesh, aliyah can still be pretty tough, as this excerpt from a blog called “Israeli or bust,” would seem to attest. Written by Dr. Herman Weiss, until recently of West Hempstead, it describes his encounter last week with a clerk at an office of Israel's Department of Motor Vehicles:

I am next and show her my paperwork. Sitting not three feet from a copier she tells me I need to get these documents (passports, Teudat Oleh, etc...) copied twice. I say O.K., there is a copier and I point to it. She did not even acknowledge that I said any thing as she handed me back my documents ..... I get everything copied and race back to the DMV ..... She takes a look at everything I copied and with disgust she hurls one of the copies back at me and says in Hebrew, 'I did not tell you to copy this.'                                                      Weissfamilymove.blogspot.com

Obviously, the process of uprooting one’s family and entire life and moving it from one country to another may never be completely free of aggravation. But Nefesh B’Nefesh has undoubtedly rendered the process a lot more palatable, and the evidence would seem to be the organization’s spectacular success in helping 15,000 North Americans make the move in the last six years. Yet, Nefesh B’Nefesh has now racked up a far greater accomplishment, the likes of which could not really have been predicted when it began implementing its system of technical and bureaucratic efficiencies, which have shaved hours and days and weeks of waiting and standing on line from the process of moving to Israel. This week it was announced that Nefesh B’Nefesh, a private organization, will take over from the Jewish Agency, a government organization, the primary responsibility for the marketing and promotion of North American aliyah. The Jewish agency will maintain its control over aliyah eligibility, but the bureaucrats responsible for that process will work in a small office, which we have visited, in the basement of the Nefesh B’Nefesh headquarters in Jerusalem. An amazing triumph of private enterprise over an inefficient government monopoly.