UK Heirs Release GBP 480,000 After a Refused Reseal in England

Result: GBP 480,000 of UK investments and bank funds released to three heirs on a fresh English grant · Timeline: 13 months from death · Challenge: English registry refused to reseal the Israeli order · Authority: HM Courts and Tribunals Service Probate Registry and the Inheritance Registrar, Haifa · Financial Impact: GBP 480,000 released, GBP 62,000 of inheritance tax settled without a forced sale

Background

A widow born in Leeds moved to Haifa in 1974 with her late husband and never left. She died there in June 2025 at eighty-nine, intestate. Her Israeli estate was modest: a two-bedroom flat on the Carmel and a current account at Bank Leumi. What her children did not expect was the size of what she had left behind in England. A building society account opened before she emigrated had been quietly rolled over for five decades, and a portfolio of UK equities held through a nominee platform had grown to just under GBP 420,000. Together the English assets came to roughly GBP 480,000, more than the Haifa flat was worth.

Two of the three children live in Manchester. The third lives in Tel Aviv. None of them had dealt with a cross-border estate before, and the family instructed a Manchester solicitor who told them, reasonably enough, that the Israeli grant could be resealed in England once it was apostilled. That advice cost them four months.

The Challenge

The Israeli half of the estate was straightforward. The Inheritance Registrar (Rasham HaYerushot) in Haifa issued a succession order (צו ירושה) under Section 66 of the Succession Law 1965, dividing the estate under the intestacy rules in Sections 10 to 17: half to the surviving spouse where one exists, and here, with the husband long dead, the whole estate in equal shares to the three children. The order was published, no objection was filed, and it issued four months after the application.

The English half was where the family ran into a doctrine that almost everyone gets wrong. Resealing a foreign grant in England and Wales is possible, but only under the Colonial Probates Act 1892, as extended by the Colonial Probates Act 1927 to protected states and mandated territories. Mandatory Palestine was once inside that extension, which is precisely why the belief that Israeli grants can be resealed has survived for seventy-five years in Anglo-Israeli families and in more than one solicitor's precedent bank. It is no longer true. The list of jurisdictions to which the Act applies today is the schedule to the Colonial Probates Act Application Order 1965, and the State of Israel does not appear in it. The registry does not have discretion to add a country.

The refusal came back with the application fee retained and no explanation beyond a standard-form line about the jurisdiction not being one to which the Act applies. By then the platform had frozen the portfolio, HMRC's six-month deadline for the inheritance tax had passed at the end of December with interest running against the estate, and the family had spent the fee and four months on a route that was never open.

In Practice: Under Section 66 of the Succession Law 1965 the Inheritance Registrar declares who the heirs are, and Section 67 requires publication with a period of not less than two weeks for objections. The application fee at the Haifa registry is NIS 507 filed online (NIS 597 on paper) plus a NIS 66 publication fee, and an uncontested file takes three to six months. The order is the only document an English registry will accept as proof of Israeli entitlement, so applying for it should be the family's first step even where most of the money sits abroad.

What We Did

We took over the English application in February 2026 and rebuilt it from the Israeli end.

Step one: a fresh grant, not a reseal. Rule 30(1) of the Non-Contentious Probate Rules 1987 governs a grant where the deceased died domiciled outside England and Wales. Where no foreign court has entrusted anyone with administration, and an Israeli succession order entrusts nobody with anything because it simply declares who the heirs are, the grant issues under rule 30(1)(b) to the person beneficially entitled by the law of the domicile. The three children were beneficially entitled under the succession order. Two of them renounced in favour of the eldest so that a single administrator would deal with the platform, which shortened the correspondence considerably.

Step two: evidence of Israeli law. This is the part that separates a grant that issues in sixteen weeks from one that sits in a queue for a year. Rule 19 of the same rules allows the district judge or registrar to accept evidence of foreign law by affidavit or witness statement from a suitably qualified person, or by a certificate from a notary practising in the country concerned. We gave the registry both belts: an Israeli notary's certificate confirming that the order was validly made by the Inheritance Registrar, that it remained in force, and that under Israeli law it vested the estate directly in the named heirs without an intermediary personal representative. That last sentence is what a district judge actually needs, and it is the sentence that a bare apostilled translation never contains.

Step three: the document chain. The succession order was apostilled by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which is the correct authority for a document issued by an Israeli state registry. The family's earlier attempt had failed on translation. They had sent the apostilled Hebrew original with an English version typed up by a nephew, and the registry would not look at it. We had the order translated by an Israeli notary under Section 15 of the Notaries Law 1976, which requires the notary to master both languages and to have made or checked the translation himself, and the notary's signature on the translation certificate was then apostilled separately at the Magistrates' Court. Two apostilles on two different documents, from two different authorities, for what the family thought of as one piece of paper.

Step four: the inheritance tax deadlock. Because the deceased had not been UK resident for at least ten of the previous twenty tax years, the long-term residence test that replaced domicile for inheritance tax on 6 April 2025 kept her Israeli assets out of scope. Her UK assets were squarely in scope. After the nil-rate band the estate owed roughly GBP 62,000, and HMRC will not issue the code that unlocks a grant until the tax is paid, while the money to pay it was sitting inside the frozen accounts. We used the Direct Payment Scheme on form IHT423, which instructs the building society to pay HMRC out of the deceased's own account before any grant exists. The tax went across in March 2026, roughly ten weeks past the six-month deadline, and the estate paid about GBP 1,100 in interest for the delay. Israel has levied no estate duty since 1981, so there was no Israeli tax to credit against the English bill and no double charge to argue about.

In Practice: A grant under rule 30(1)(b) of the Non-Contentious Probate Rules 1987 is applied for on form PA1A through the HM Courts and Tribunals Service Probate Registry. This family filed in February 2026 and paid GBP 300. Anyone filing now pays GBP 526, because the fee rose on 13 July 2026 for estates above GBP 5,000, while sealed copies fell from GBP 16 to GBP 2 each, so order ten at the outset. The Israeli evidence bundle cost NIS 1,150 all in: MFA apostille NIS 41, notarial translation NIS 251 for the first hundred words and NIS 197 per hundred thereafter, and a Magistrates' Court apostille of NIS 59 on the notary's certificate. From filing to grant took sixteen weeks.

The Outcome

The grant of letters of administration issued in June 2026. The nominee platform released the portfolio within eleven days of receiving a sealed copy, the building society took three weeks longer because it insisted on its own bereavement forms, and the full GBP 480,000 was distributed to the three children in equal shares in July 2026, thirteen months after their mother died.

Nothing was sold at a bad moment. The equities were transferred in specie to the children's own accounts rather than liquidated, which mattered because two of them were higher-rate taxpayers who would have crystallised gains they did not need to crystallise. The Haifa flat was dealt with separately on the Israeli succession order alone, since Section 138 of the Succession Law 1965 reserves succession to immovable property in Israel to Israeli law whatever the deceased's domicile, and no English document has any part to play in a tabu transfer. The four months lost to the reseal attempt cost the family the initial application fee, about GBP 1,100 of avoidable interest on the inheritance tax, and roughly GBP 4,000 in duplicated professional time. Slightly over GBP 5,000, then, for a doctrine that has been out of date since 1965.

Key Takeaways

What this case illustrates for non-residents in similar situations:

1. England and Wales cannot reseal an Israeli grant. The Colonial Probates Act route closed for Israel when the Colonial Probates Act Application Order 1965 omitted it, and no amount of apostilling changes that. If a solicitor proposes a reseal, ask them to point to Israel in the schedule before you pay the fee.
2. Get the Israeli succession order first, even when most of the money is abroad. A rule 30 grant is built on evidence of who is entitled under the law of the domicile, and in an Israeli estate that evidence is the Section 66 order. Applying for the English grant before the Israeli order exists puts the file in the wrong order and guarantees a requisition.
3. A translation and its apostille are two separate exercises. The apostille on the Hebrew original authenticates the registry. It says nothing about the English text. Israeli registries and English registries both want a notarial translation under Section 15 of the Notaries Law 1976, with its own apostille on the notary's signature.
4. Ask the Israeli notary to certify the legal effect, not just the wording. A certificate under rule 19 that explains that an Israeli succession order vests the estate directly in the heirs, with no personal representative in between, is what lets the district judge apply rule 30(1)(b) without further enquiry.
5. Plan for the inheritance tax before the grant, not after. The Direct Payment Scheme on form IHT423 exists precisely because the money needed to pay the tax is locked behind the grant the tax unlocks. This estate still paid about GBP 1,100 in interest, purely because four months went into the wrong application while the six-month deadline expired.

For a fuller list of what an Israeli estate file needs before anything is sent abroad, see our foreign heir document checklist, and for the narrower procedural question our Q&A on apostilling an Israeli succession order for use in the UK sets out the same chain in summary form.

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Facing a Similar Situation?

If a parent who lived in Israel left accounts, shares, or a property in England, the Israeli order and the English grant are two separate applications built from the same evidence, and the sequence matters more than the speed of either one.

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