There it is, the dreaded North American Aliyah word: the Apostille!

Never will you face down a greater threat and hold-up to a person’s or family’s Aliyah than that sure-to-drive-terror-into-your-heart Apostille!

When I went to get our marriage license certified (which is a fancy way of saying notarized) in New York City at the county clerk’s office (which is something I had to do before getting it apostilled), I realized I had not only seen the word “Apostille” years before when I had to venture to the clerk’s office on different business, but that finally, twenty years later, I actually understood what the sign meant…

“NO APOSTILLES!” the sign reads. (Literally, with an exclamation mark.)

When I had seen this sign the first time when I was probably in my early twenties I had absolutely no idea how to even pronounce the word apostille, let alone know what it meant or why it had to be proclaimed so loudly and clearly at the front entrance to the clerk’s building. I think I remember thinking that Apostilles must be the official term for “vagrant” and the building was saying: “Back! Back with you, oh abhorrent Apostilles! Ye shall not loiter near this building, so help us God!” So in my mind apostille referred to either some kind of vagabond or someone who was trying to collect charity.

Twenty years later and that same sign is still there, plastered across the front entrance (in more than one location now in fact) and I finally understood what it meant and why the county clerk’s office would put a sign like that on its building. (Though I still can’t imagine anyone who hasn’t needed an apostille having the slightest clue as to its meaning…)

So what is an “Apostille”? And why are they so troublesome to obtain? (And why would the clerk’s building want you know that you can’t get them there?)

I must say that as we journeyed towards Aliyah we had been warned so many times over the years about getting these apostilles that I felt scared and quite a bit intimidated by the notion of having to obtain one. (One? Ha! Who are we kidding? We required no less than SEVEN. And from at least three different states! God help us…)

The truth is, apostilles are really not that big a mystery.

The easiest way to think of it is as a state’s official testament that a notarized or certified document that you possess is in fact legit. Put simply, an apostille is nothing more than a given state’s State Department attesting to the fact that your official document – which has been notarized or attested to or verified etc. – is in fact the document issued by the agency whose signatory is recognized by the state.

(Basically, it’s a fancy notarization saying that the signature on your document is legit. It is essentially the notarization FOR the notarization. That’s it.)

For example: What does our New York Marriage License apostille say on it? It says, “the person who signed off on this marriage license [Herby Hancock] is, in fact, the licensed and recognized person who is allowed to sign off on and recognize said license. Have a nice day.” To this they add a nice picturesque seal of the great state of New York – whatever the NY State Department seal happens to look like – and they either staple or fix that document to the document you needed apostilled. (You MUST keep the apostille attached to the document (do not remove it!) or it will void the entire thing.)

So how do you get an apostille and why is it so damn hard?

It’s actually not that hard when you know what you’re doing, but it is quite time consuming. Which is why there are services out there prepared to charge you as much as $250-$350 dollars to go and get them for you, quickly. Because by the time you have secured the correct documents that you need apostilled and gotten them to the right place, you may be looking at a wait time from 8-10 business days to as much as 3-4 weeks to get them back apostilled. That’s the reality. This is the timeline piece of the Aliyah process that it would be very helpful to understand and appreciate, but unfortunately, [and I’m speaking from my own experience here] when you make Aliyah, it seems that the last thing anyone wants to give you is a sense of what your actual Aliyah timeline will look like. (But that is for another blog post.)

Typically, the only government agency that can issue apostilles is the State Department of that state. For example, in the state of New York (and also in New York City), apostilles are given and processed where the State Department offices are, which are almost uniformly located in the state’s capitol, which in this case would be Albany. There are exceptions to this rule, for example, if someone needs documents apostilled immediately some agencies have the authority to “apostille” them without having to go through the state department. New York City’s Department of State (yes, New York City has its own Department of State…), for example, will, provided you make an appointment ahead of time and can show that you are leaving the country within the next two weeks, issue you same-day apostilles in their NYC office without having to ship your docs to Albany. New Jersey also offers “apostilles while you wait” services in their Trenton offices, but it will run you between $500 and $1000 per apostille depending on how long you want to wait ($500 for a 2-hour wait, $1000 for a 1-hour wait – I kid you not.) But generally speaking, if you need something apostilled, you’ll have to either travel to your state’s capitol, OR have your documents shipped there to the correct offices.

Every state issues a different form of apostille – which makes sense, because each state knows (or is supposed to know, or be able to verify) the government official who signed their official document and should be able to attest to that. So if you have documents that originate in Pennsylvania for example (say, a birth certificate) then you are going to need to get that document apostilled in Pennsylvania’s State Department, which is located in Harrisburg, the capitol of Pennsylvania. In this case, if you live – like I do – in Philadelphia, making the hour-and-a-half drive to Harrisburg to the capitol building is not such a big deal. (Especially since they take walk-ins, something that is not offered in every state. And especially since in Harrisburg, they will literally apostille your document in seconds, while you wait, and it costs just a few dollars.) If you live in Erie however, you’re crap out-of-luck and you will either have to mail your documents to Harrisburg to get apostilled -OR- make the whopping ten-hour drive round-trip to Harrisburg for what is basically a two-minute process. (And trust me, Pennsylvania is amazing in this regard.)

Before COVID, many, if not most, State Departments allowed walk-ins, and getting apostilles on your documents was either a matter of taking a trip to your state’s capitol and running around for a bit to find the right office and wait on line to get it done, or – for those who didn’t want to make the trip – just mailing it in and getting it back within a week or two. COVID however shut down most state department buildings or severely hampered or limited their interactions with the public, thus making the process a veritable nightmare and often taking two to three times the amount of time needed to get this done.

However, since several of the more important documents a family needs for Aliyah (such as birth certificates and marriage licenses etc.) require apostilles, this becomes one of the more lengthy and drawn-out processes of the entire Aliyah journey. If you and your spouse (and your children, which is how it was with our family) were born in different states then you will each need to not only obtain your original birth certificate from those states, but then get those certificates apostilled by the State Department of that particular state. (And for all intents and purposes, New York City – which I’ll get to – functions like its own independent state)

FOR EXAMPLE: I was born in New Jersey, our three oldest children were born in the Bronx (New York City), our fourth was born in Binghamton (New York State), and our fifth was born in Lower Merion (Pennsylvania). This required us to obtain apostilles from New Jersey, New York, New York CITY, and Pennsylvania. So, by comparison, if you are one of the lucky few who had that picture-perfect wedding on a beach somewhere in Hawaii, and your marriage was registered in Hawaii, you’re going to need to get your marriage license apostilled from the State Department in Honolulu.

What’s it going to cost and how long is it going to take?

The cost and timeline for obtaining an apostille varies from state to state. In Pennsylvania, once I got into the office, without an appointment, it cost me just a few dollars ($10 I think?) to get my son’s birth certificate apostilled and took literally less than two minutes. (The service was so fast that they actually requested I wait within fifteen feet of the check-in desk (and not leave the room!) so that I can take it and leave as soon as it was ready) In New Jersey, using expedited service ($45 fee) and dropping it off at the window in the Trenton office, it took nearly three weeks to get my birth certificate back by mail (which cost an extra $26 for an overnight USPS priority mail return envelope, which I chose to use, and which you need to supply them with to get your document(s) back). Of course, as mentioned above, New Jersey offers apostilles while you wait, and you can have them returned to you within an hour (or two) if you’re willing to pay $500 or even $1000. New York apostilles cost $10 per document to be apostilled, plus the cost of the envelope to Albany, and the cost of a return envelope to your home, and took close to three weeks to get back. (And this doesn’t include the amount of time you will need to wait in line to obtain your certificates, get them authenticated at a clerk’s office, or driving or traveling to the specific city to do this.)

Depending on the number of documents you need apostilled, when all is said and done you may spend as much as $1000 on dealing with these documents or as little as a few hundred or less, depending on what your needs are.

What else should you know?

When requesting apostilles by mail from your state’s State Department, you will, in almost all instances, need to supply your own mailing envelopes. You’d think that the apostille services would have envelopes on hand to sell you. This is typically not the case (but read the instructions online at your state’s Department of State for exceptions). Most locations will only accept first class, certified or registered mail envelopes, so it is important that you come prepared. These envelopes can often cost as much as the apostille itself, for example. we only used overnight USPS priority mail envelopes, for both sending the requests AND for the return envelopes. Each cost approximately $13, so in addition to the cost of the apostilles, we had to pay $26 in postage for each mail-in request for apostilles. Luckily we only needed to do this twice. And the reason for this is that if you are filing for multiple apostilles from the same state you can almost always send them in one envelope, and likewise only include one return envelope and you will receive them all together.

So in our case for example, we needed four apostilled certificates from NYC: Our Marriage License (1), and our three oldest children’s birth certificates (3). We only needed one sending envelope, and one return envelope to accomplish this as we sent them all together. The NYC Department of State – where you will have to go to get your documents apostilled – did not supply or sell envelopes, so since I was not prepared for this, I had to walk to the nearest downtown post office and purchase my priority mail envelopes first and then bring them over to the state department. Luckily I had enough time to do this before they closed. Navigating NYC’s bureaucracy is almost as bad as Israel’s, and sometimes it’s actually worse. I will be writing a separate blog-post about how to navigate some of the issues around the NYC apostille scavenger hunt.

Why I’m writing this

No one was around to really explain all of this to us. No one could really explain what apostilles were and how we were to obtain them. We had to figure it out on our own. We got some advice here and there, but an actual step-by-step explanation of what we needed to do we felt was nowhere to be found. My hope is that what I have written here will help others understand what they need to do and how to do it, and I’m hoping that this post will not only demystify the process a bit, but also help empower others to accomplish this step on their Aliyah journey and help them shed their fear or concern about what apostilles are and how to obtain them, and to realize that though the process may be a little complicated, it is doable. You CAN do this!