The son of a Toronto rabbi lost a legal battle to have his Canadian passport list his birthplace as Jerusalem, Israel. Eliyahu Veffer, a student at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, had argued that excluding his country of birth on his passport was a violation of his religious beliefs and thus contrary to the Canadian Charter of Rights. Canada s passport office has a policy of writing the city of Jerusalem without any reference to a country, so as not to recognize Jerusalem as part of Israel. During the course of the two-year court battle, the government recalled 146 passports after discovering that they had inadvertently listed Jerusalem, Israel, as a place of birth.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.