After a week and a half, we finally got our internet and phone yesterday, and it’s amazing to be able to freely connect to the outside world again!

I have loads of things I want to tell you about, but I’m never going to get to what’s going on now if I try to catch you up on the last week!  As far as the technicalities, I’ve spent every morning at different government offices – the Ministry of the Interior, the Ministry of Absorbtion, the municipality, the office of National Insurance – and though everything has taken time, I haven’t felt aggravated by the bureaucracy of all of this until today.

As returning citizens, we have to pay a fee of almost 10,000 shekels per person over the age of 18 in order to restart our insurance.  Thanks to a recently passed law that is of two year duration – and our move to Israel falls out in this period of time – this money is fully refunded, half immediately and the other half in a year.  Once this money is paid, we can then sign up for a health fund.

You wouldn’t think it would be so hard to pay this money, but we’ve been to that office three times and still no luck!  Today I was initially told that we have to establish our residency before they’ll take our money (afterward I was told they’d take our money – as if they were doing us a favor – but it still wouldn’t help us get insurance).  I told her that we’ve repeatedly established our residency with the Israeli embassy, whatever Israeli ministry handled the approval for our tickets as returning citizens, the Ministry of Absorbtion and the Ministry of the Interior here in Israel – so since we have documentation of all that, isn’t it enough?  No.  We need to redocument everything for this particular office, but this time they’re insisting on proof of enrollment of the kids in school before we can establish our residency.

This isn’t so simple since none of the kids ages 12 and under are going to school.  (Earlier I wrote I would be putting some of the kids in school, but back in May we decided otherwise; I’ve  been wanting to share with you about how I came to that decision but haven’t had time.)  I still have to file for an approval from the Israeli government to homeschool, but this hasn’t been on the top of my list; I’m trying to get the most basic things taken care of.

Tomorrow I’m going to the local girls high school to sign up dd15 and dd16, and I’m already feeling under the gun about homeschooling because the principal is insisting on putting the girls back a grade because they’ve never been in school before.  If I had been mentally prepared for her asking for transcripts and records, I would have handled it differently and sidestepped this issue without mentioning homeschooling, but what’s done is done.  Tomorrow the girls will be tested and I’ll discuss their grade placement with the principal in person (so far we’ve only talked on the phone) because holding them back isn’t my idea of what would be beneficial to them, and I’ll refuse to enroll them if it comes to that.

Anyway, I’ll take their school registration back to the National Insurance office along with our house contract, bank records, and whatever else they’ve asked for, and hopefully that will be enough to show that we actually are planning to live here and didn’t come to scam the Israeli health insurance system. 🙂

Avivah