Six months after submitting her application, Bandorenko has yet to receive a
visa.
Although the Foreign Ministry vigorously denies that Russian Jewish women
seeking visas at the Moscow embassy are subject to such questioning,
Bandorenko, it appears, is not alone in having been confronted in such a manner
by Israeli consular officials.
"That is a known thing, it has been going on for some time," said an Israeli
official based in Moscow. "The consular staff frequently ask good-looking women
seeking to visit Israel to prove that they are not prostitutes, or that they do
not plan to work in the sex trade while they are there. It is completely
outrageous, extremely insulting and it should be stopped."
"Consular officials do not speak that way, and I can assure you that such
things do not happen," Foreign Ministry spokesman Eddie Shapira said.
According to Shapira, who served in Moscow until returning to Jerusalem last
year, "Such claims are utterly baseless. Our staff meticulously follows the
rules and procedures laid down by the Interior Ministry and by the consular
section of the Foreign Ministry."
"Anyone who feels that a consular official has not treated them properly," he
said, "can submit a complaint to the Interior Ministry and the Foreign
Ministry, and it will be reviewed with the utmost seriousness."
Shapira noted that some 50,000 Russian citizens visited Israel last year, and
that the consular staff at the Moscow embassy handled hundreds of requests for
visas on a daily basis, largely without incident.
But Inna Chizikova, a Russian Jew with grown children who edits a Jewish
community newspaper, told The Jerusalem Post about a similar experience she had
when she went to the embassy to apply for a visa to attend her son's wedding in
Jerusalem.
"My husband, my mother and I, together with our other son, went to request
visas," Chizikova recalled. "Then, in front of my family members, the clerk
told me that I was very pretty and asked if perhaps I was going to Israel to
make money as a prostitute. My husband thought it was a joke, but for me it was
terrible. I felt horrible afterward."
