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Before I left the Old Country ...
In the late 70s the State of Illinois added photographs to drivers licenses. Prior to that time, all an underaged teenager had to do to buy alcohol or get into an 'R' rated movie was to borrow a license from a friend who had the same eye color and was roughly the same height. Looking back, I realize that while I got a nice laminated photo ID issued by my high school when I was a freshman in 1975, it would be several years before my parents got a card of similar quality from the State.
When I made Aliyah ...
I was given an orange teudat zehut at the airport with my photograph stapled in. Even though my arrival had been coordinated with the Misrad HaKlita weeks in advance, my personal details were entered by hand on the spot. As luck would have it, the pakid made a mistake entering my lastname which I didn't notice until later. When I opened up my first bank account, the bank officer noticed the discrepancy between the way I spelled my name on the forms and the way it was spelled in the teudat zehut. When I explained what had happened, he said "no problem," and just took a pen and corrected the spelling in the teudat zehut.
When I made aliyah, the clerk at Ben Gurion asked me where I came from. "Washington, DC", I said. "What state is that?" he asked, and I explained that it wasn't in a state, that DC stood for "District of Columbia".
ReplyDeleteOn my teudat olah was written that my country of origin was Colombia.