How UK Heirs Voided a Jerusalem Will Clause Signed by a Witness's Wife

Result: The apartment clause struck out and a NIS 3.35 million Jerusalem property returned to the family line · Timeline: 19 months from the newspaper notice to distribution · Challenge: Beneficiary's husband attested the will · Authority: Inheritance Registrar and the Jerusalem Family Court · Financial Impact: NIS 3.35 million recovered, NIS 71,000 in fees and costs

Background

Our clients were three cousins, two in north London and one in Leeds, none of whom had been to Israel since the 1990s. Their aunt, a childless widow, had lived alone in a two-bedroom flat off Rehov Bar Ilan in Jerusalem for over forty years and died there in early 2025 at the age of 91. They expected the flat to come to them; they were the children of her two predeceased brothers, and she had no spouse, no children and no surviving parents. What reached them instead, forwarded by an old family friend in Israel, was a Hebrew newspaper notice announcing that somebody else had applied to prove a will. The applicant was the daughter of the couple who had lived on the floor below since 2011. Under the 2019 will she took the apartment outright. The cousins had eleven days left to react and no idea what a hitnagdut was.

The Challenge

The will itself looked unimpeachable at first reading. It was a witnessed will made under Section 20 of the Succession Law 5725-1965, typed in Hebrew, signed by the aunt in front of two witnesses who each declared and signed underneath in the required form. Both witnesses were adults of full capacity, so Section 24 was satisfied. There was no medical evidence of incapacity, no suggestion the signature was forged, and a challenge on undue influence would have meant proving what happened inside a flat we could not enter, against a family who had been feeding and driving our client's aunt for the last four years of her life. Those cases fail more often than they succeed, and they are ruinous to run from abroad.

The answer was in the attestation block, not in the body of the will. The second witness shared a surname with the beneficiary. A Population Registry extract confirmed it: he was her husband. Section 35 of the Succession Law 1965 disposes of that in one sentence. A provision in a will, other than an oral will, in favour of a person who prepared the will or witnessed it or was otherwise concerned in its preparation, or in favour of such a person's spouse, is void. The clause did not need to be proved improper. It did not need a finding that anyone had behaved badly. It was void on its face, and the only questions left were procedural: could we get the objection in before an order was granted, and would voiding one clause bring the whole will down with it.

In Practice: Under Section 35 of the Succession Law 5725-1965 a bequest to an attesting witness, or to that witness's spouse, is void without any proof of impropriety, and Section 25 cannot rescue it, because Section 25 reaches only defects in the testator's or witnesses' signature, the date, the procedure under Sections 20 to 23, and the capacity of the witnesses. The application our opponents had filed at the Inheritance Registrar (Rasham HaYerushot) cost them NIS 543 plus a NIS 136 publication fee; our objection under Section 67 had to be filed before an order issued, and the transfer to the Jerusalem Family Court under Section 67A took 5 weeks from the day the objection was stamped.

What We Did

We filed the objection first and investigated afterwards. Section 67 requires the court or Registrar to publish notice of a probate application and fix a period of not less than 14 days for objections, and any interested person may object within that period and so long as the order has not been made. That second limb is the one that saves foreign heirs, because the 14 days almost always expires before a family in England has finished asking each other what the notice means. We filed a short holding objection on the fourth day after instruction, asserting the cousins' status as heirs on intestacy under Section 10, and reserved the grounds.

Getting the cousins' authority into Israeli form took the next fortnight and ran in parallel. Each cousin signed a power of attorney before a solicitor in England, which the FCDO Legalisation Office in Milton Keynes apostilled at GBP 45 per document on the standard postal service in ten working days. One cousin was travelling and used the e-apostille service at GBP 35 instead, which came back in three days and reached us first. Certified Hebrew translations were commissioned in Tel Aviv, at NIS 251 for the first hundred words of each document under the Notaries Regulations 1977 scale.

The evidential work was narrower than the cousins feared. We ordered a Population Registry extract for the second witness and for the beneficiary, which established the marriage as at the date the will was signed. We obtained the original will from the court file and a certified copy of the attestation page. We also ordered the aunt's death certificate and the two brothers' death certificates, and one Israeli birth certificate that had to be reissued because the aunt's maiden name was spelled two different ways across the family papers. That single spelling problem added six weeks.

Once the objection was stamped, the Registrar transferred the file to the Jerusalem Family Court under Section 67A, and the applicant became plaintiff and our clients defendants. We ran two arguments and abandoned nothing in reserve. First, Section 35 voided the apartment clause outright. Second, Section 38(b) governs what happens next: where a part or provision of a will is void, the remaining provisions are not thereby rendered void, unless the court finds them inseparably bound up with the void part or concludes the testator would not have wished them to stand without it. The will also left a modest bank balance to a Jerusalem soup kitchen, and we did not attack that clause. Conceding it was deliberate. It signalled that we were enforcing the statute rather than raiding the estate, and it made the severance argument look like what it was.

In Practice: Section 38(b) of the Succession Law 1965 severs a void provision from the rest of a will unless the surviving provisions are inseparably bound up with it, which is why our clients recovered the apartment while the charitable legacy of roughly NIS 46,000 was left standing. A contested file at the Jerusalem Family Court ran 11 months from transfer to judgment and NIS 20,000 to NIS 45,000 in legal fees on each side, and none of the three cousins attended a hearing, their evidence being confined to affidavits filed with apostilled powers of attorney.

The other side's counsel did try Section 25, which permits probate notwithstanding a defect regarding the signature of the testator or the witnesses, the date, the procedure in Sections 20 to 23, or the capacity of the witnesses. It does not reach Section 35, and it never has. Section 35 sits in the article dealing with validity, not in the article dealing with execution. The judge disposed of the point in a paragraph.

The Outcome

Judgment came down in April 2026. The apartment clause was declared void under Section 35, the remainder of the will was upheld under Section 38(b), and probate was granted in respect of the charitable legacy only. The apartment, forming the rest of the estate, passed on intestacy, and a succession order followed in favour of the three cousins in equal shares. The Land Registry (Tabu) registered them as owners eleven weeks later, on the strength of the order and apostilled powers of attorney, with no cousin present in Israel at any stage.

They sold within the year. The flat, dated but well positioned, went for NIS 3.35 million in July 2026. Costs on our side came to roughly NIS 71,000 all-in, including the court fee, translations, apostilles and the Land Registry work. The court exercised its discretion under Section 74 and directed that a substantial part of the applicant's costs come out of her own pocket rather than the estate, which mattered less to the cousins than the fact that they no longer had to explain to their children why an aunt's apartment had gone to the neighbours.

Key Takeaways

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

1. Read the attestation page before you read the will. Who signed as witness, and who they are married to, decides more Israeli will disputes than the contents of the bequests do, and Section 35 requires no proof of wrongdoing at all.
2. File a holding objection first and build the grounds later. Section 67 permits an objection at any time before the order is made, not merely within the published 14-day window, and that difference is what keeps a family in England in the game.
3. Section 25 is not a universal cure. It rescues defects in signature, date, execution procedure and witness capacity. It does nothing for a will that offends Section 35, Section 30 or Section 26.
4. Do not attack every clause. Leaving an unobjectionable legacy alone strengthens a severance argument under Section 38(b) and costs almost nothing, since the clause you concede is usually the small one.
5. Order the Population Registry extracts early. Marriage between a witness and a beneficiary is provable from public records in days, whereas an undue influence case takes months and usually fails. For an heir abroad, the difference between the two is the difference between a case and a grievance.

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Facing a Similar Situation?

If a probate notice has appeared in Israel and the will benefits someone who was standing in the room when it was signed, the window to act is short but the legal ground may be far stronger than it looks from London. We regularly review Israeli wills for defects that decide the matter without a trial, and our guide to contesting an Israeli will from abroad sets out the wider grounds and timetable.

Contact us for a confidential consultation about your Israeli legal matter.