It’s a tale of love, language, and the law.

“I wasn’t raised with much involvement in Judaism,” says Ariana Phillips, 28, who grew up in Annapolis, Maryland, and is the daughter of a Jewish mother and a non-Jewish father. “I didn’t go to synagogue. I didn’t go to Jewish day school.”

However, after matriculating at Washington University in St. Louis and participating in Chabad and Hillel activities on campus, her interest in Judaism grew.

“When I saw how my sister was involved in the different activities that she was doing with them and the trip to Israel that she took, I started to get involved as well,” she recalls.

Phillips traveled to Israel on a Birthright program after her first year of college in June 2017, and then joined a three-month Masa program in Jerusalem. She developed a strong connection to Israel and became aware of the various opportunities available for study and work.

One of the main obstacles to any trip to a foreign locale is learning the language. Phillips was proactive in this regard. Before her trip, she downloaded an app called HelloTalk, which enables users to learn a foreign language by chatting with native speakers from around the world in the language they want to learn. Phillips, who wanted to learn Hebrew before her visit, was paired with Roy (pronounced Ro-ee) Cohen, a Shoham resident who had downloaded the app to learn English.

Phillips and Cohen did not meet during her Birthright summer trip because he was on a post-army trip at the time, but they finally met in person three years later, when she staffed a Birthright trip in January 2020.

Cohen and Phillips immediately connected once they met and saw each other several times during Phillips’s breaks in the Birthright schedule. They had planned to travel together to Budapest in March 2020, but that trip was canceled due to COVID-19. In September 2020, they vacationed in Croatia, one of the few countries open to vaccinated Israelis and Americans at the time.

In May 2021, Phillips visited Cohen in Israel again and decided to make aliyah. After her arrival, she encountered difficulties with the Interior Ministry.

“At first,” she explains, “they didn’t want to give me a work visa because they thought that my father had converted my mother to Christianity after their marriage. I had to prove to them that I was Jewish and that I was raised Jewish.”

Phillips took the initiative and submitted a 20-page document detailing her Jewish origins, ranging from childhood photos showing family celebrations of Rosh Hashanah, Hanukkah, and Passover, to letters from Hillel and campus rabbis attesting to her Judaism, as well as a similar note from Israel Outdoors, an organizer of Birthright Israel trips, from when she staffed the Birthright trip. In addition, Phillips provided information about her mother’s Jewish identity, including documentation of her bat mitzvah and records of her attendance at a Jewish day school.

The ministry approved her documents, enabling her to obtain a work visa, and then officially make aliyah.
“Once I had the proof that I was Jewish from the work visa,” she says, “the rest of the process was pretty smooth.”

Phillips received her work visa in September of 2021 and was approved for aliyah in November of that year.

After becoming a citizen, Phillips worked to integrate herself into Israeli society. She built her career at Credit Suisse and J.P. Morgan (she will be joining McKinsey soon), volunteered as an English teacher at the elementary school in Shoham, and eventually became a private English teacher, instructing students one on one. She even joined the Israeli Women Basketball Premier League (Ligat Ha’al), playing guard for Petah Tikva. However, when she and Cohen decided to marry, her Jewish status was questioned once again.

Phillips and Cohen became engaged in January 2025 and set a wedding date for a year later, in January 2026. Phillips contacted an Orthodox rabbi whom she wanted to conduct the ceremony. He recommended that they submit an online registration to get married with the Hof Hasharon Rabbinate.

“They had asked me to submit all of my documents,” recalls Phillips. “I needed to submit the marriage certificate of both parents, and I provided birth certificates and any proof of Judaism because I don’t have any family in Israel. But basically, all of the documentation that they wanted, I didn’t have, and my parents’ marriage certificate had the name of a priest on it because they got married with a dual ceremony, conducted by a rabbi and a priest in a church.”

As had happened earlier with the ministry, she says, the rabbis suspected that her non-Jewish father had somehow converted her mother to Christianity after their marriage.

The rabbinate did not accept the letters from the rabbis that the ministry had previously accepted for her aliyah, since they were not on the list of rabbis approved by the Israeli Chief Rabbinate. The Hof Hasharon Rabbinate told Phillips that for it to approve her marriage application, she would have to appear before a rabbinical court (beit din) in Petah Tikva and convince it that she is, in fact, Jewish. This was three weeks before the wedding.

Phillips didn't know how she could conclusively prove her Jewishness to the rabbis. That’s when her sister, who works as a fact checker and researcher for a company in the United States, came across ITIM, the Jerusalem-based organization that helps people navigate state-administered Jewish life in Israel. Phillips contacted ITIM two days before the hearing and asked for its assistance.

Rabbi Seth Farber, founder and head of ITIM, explains the issues that Phillips had encountered.
“The operating principle today of the rabbinate is they’ll only accept a letter attesting to the Jewishness of an applicant from a rabbi who is functioning as a community rabbi.” It is reluctant to accept the testimony of a rabbi who met the applicant only during their college years and did not know the person previously.

“Within these kinds of situations,” says Farber, “often what we do is try to either find a rabbi in America who can do the research and has standing as a communal rabbi or connect her to a community in America, or go to one of the recognized rabbinical courts in America.”

In this case, however, there was no time for that, so Farber tried another tactic – research. “We had to do the research ourselves and come straight to the beit din.”

Farber tasked Jenny Brenner, a case manager in the assistance center at ITIM and rabbinical court advocate, to investigate Phillips’s case

“Very quickly,” says Brenner, “we organized everything and got ourselves prepared for the hearing. She actually had quite a number of documents as proof of her Jewish status.”

Phillips had provided the court with an extensive list. “When we looked at it, it was very clear to us that she shouldn’t have a problem proving her Jewish status.” Had she been presenting these documents to a rabbinical court in the US, says Brenner, there would have been far fewer issues.

“It would have been very clear to the rabbinical court in the US that she was definitely Jewish. When you take those same documents here, the rabbinical councils and the rabbinical courts are not used to dealing with American or foreign documents.”

Often, explains Brenner, people needing to prove their Jewishness to the rabbinical courts go to ITIM with relatively little information. By contrast, Phillips had already built a family tree that dated back to her great-great-grandmother. She had even sent Brenner a marriage announcement for her maternal grandmother’s wedding, which appeared in a local Milwaukee newspaper in the 1950s.

Moreover, she had located an earlier marriage announcement for her maternal great-grandmother from the 1930s, who had, in fact, been married by an Orthodox rabbi. The 1950s wedding announcement, which also mentioned a rabbi, provided further evidence of her Jewish lineage. In those days, explains Brenner, mixed marriages were rarely performed even by Reform rabbis, which indicated that her grandmother had also married a Jewish man.

Phillips had also sent Brenner photographs of the tombstones of some of her relatives. And after researching the names online, Brenner and her team located her great-great-grandmother’s immigration record from Ellis Island in 1907, using ITIM’s membership in the Ellis Island Foundation’s online databases. The immigration document, she explains, listed Phillips’s great-great-grandmother’s Hebrew name, which was written in English letters. “The name on the immigration document matched the name that appears on the tombstone, so we knew that we were talking about the same person,” says Brenner.

The ITIM researchers then connected the dots. The Ellis Island immigration record from 1907 lists the name of her great-great-grandmother – Masha – and her two children. Using these records, along with census documents, they traced a continuous family line from Phillips’s great-great-grandmother to the present day, creating a Hebrew version of Phillips’s family tree for the rabbis’ benefit. Brenner explains that the Ellis Island document and census records proved the connection between Phillips’s great-great-grandmother, great-grandmother, and grandmother.

The rabbinical court requested a copy of her mother’s birth certificate to establish the link between her mother and grandmother, which Brenner and Phillips provided.

Those documents, coupled with a letter that Brenner received on the day of the court appearance from a Chabad rabbi who met the rabbinate’s criteria and had known her family for many years, enabled Phillips’s application to be officially approved. 

However, one final twist to the story remained. The rabbinical court in Petah Tikva ruled that, while Phillips was indisputably Jewish, it could not authorize her marriage to Cohen; he is a kohen, a member of the Jewish priestly lineage tracing back to Aaron. According to many halachic authorities, a kohen may not marry a woman whose father is not Jewish, even though she herself is considered a full-fledged Jew.

While this law is part of normative Jewish practice as codified in the Code of Jewish Law (Shulhan Aruch), it is not always applied under certain circumstances. Brenner suggested that Phillips and Cohen apply for a marriage license in a different location, where the rabbinate takes a more lenient approach. The couple took her advice, received the marriage license five days before their wedding, and were married on time on January 2. 

Looking back, Phillips is grateful that things worked out in time. “It was definitely a lot of bureaucracy, and having to go to the beit din and having to go to the mikveh and the bridal preparation course, and from one step to another, and trying to gather all the documents and trying to explain the situation clearly. It took a lot of time. And there were parts where I thought, ‘Okay, maybe I just won’t get married with the rabbinate.’ 

“Jenny was there and was very helpful and was with me for the entire process,” she says. “She was able to find a lot more documents and to explain to the rabbinate exactly what they wanted to hear, and she also knew how to prepare for that beit din.

“I don’t think I would have been comfortable going there by myself and trying to find my way and explain myself and also answer all their questions about my family history. I think my recommendation for anyone else who went through the situation is to start with ITIM and use their help.”

With the successful resolution of the legal issues surrounding Phillips’s Jewish background and her recent marriage, just one question remains: What language do Cohen and Phillips use today when speaking with each other?

“We do both,” says Phillips with a smile. “In the beginning, I would speak to him in Hebrew, and he would speak to me in English. That way, we would both get to practice the languages that we were trying to learn. But now it’s mixed. Sometimes he’ll speak to me in Hebrew, and I’ll speak to him in English. We kind of switch with it back and forth now.”■