Bnei Brak postal workers track down a woman’s long-lost German passport

A columnist from Bnei Brak recounted how postal workers there went out of their way to help her recover a long-delayed passport from the German consulate. She said the episode left her speechless in her office and so moved that she decided not to tell her family until Shabbat, when she presented the story as a Sabbath meal conversation piece.

Her account began years earlier, in 2005, when her first child was born and she tried to secure German citizenship through family ties to Holocaust survivors who had lived in Germany. She described the process as bureaucratically exhausting, involving the old German Embassy site on Daniel Frisch Street in Tel Aviv, multiple documents, translations, notarization and repeated dealings with officials. After completing the steps, she and her child received German citizenship, and she later renewed passports whenever more children were born.

In the past year, however, she became lax. Her own passport expired, she rarely used it, and when she finally decided to renew it she struggled to book an appointment. Her son-in-law helped her get one. At the appointment, she arrived without any documents or even the old passport, which she said was at home for her grandchildren to play “travel” with. The clerk asked how she expected to be helped, and the writer said she felt overwhelmed by thoughts of the Holocaust and promised to send whatever was needed by email.

After she sent the requested material, though one file was initially wrong and had to be corrected, she eventually gave up on the process. Weeks later, registered mail arrived at her home, and family members told her to pick it up at the post office on Rabbi Akiva Street. She ignored the notices, assuming it was just an annoying bill. Then, on the day she was calming herself with a Diet Sprite, she received a message from the post office asking whether she was Efrat Barzel and whether an important package from the German consulate had been left there for a long time and was about to be returned. The postal workers had kept it for her, and she described them as “good Jews” and praised the kindness of people behind the counter.