How a Missing Medical Certificate Saved an 87-Year-Old's Netanya Apartment

Result: A sale agreement and irrevocable power of attorney signed by an 87-year-old in a Netanya hospital ward were abandoned, the caveat over her NIS 2,750,000 apartment deleted, and the buyer's deposit returned · Timeline: 6 months from discovery to deletion · Challenge: A notarised signature carries statutory evidential weight · Authority: Land Registry (Tabu), Family Court, Ministry of Justice · Financial Impact: NIS 2,750,000 apartment preserved, NIS 570,000 undervalue avoided

Background

A widow of 87 had lived alone for eleven years in a three-room apartment near the seafront in Netanya. Her son and daughter were both in Chicago, and they managed what they could by phone: a cleaner twice a week, the arnona by standing order, a neighbour with a spare key. In February 2025 she fell in the kitchen and was admitted to a hospital in Netanya with a fractured hip. The file noted vascular dementia, diagnosed the previous year, which the children knew about and the neighbour knew about too. On 18 February, six days into the admission, a notary attended the ward. Their mother signed a sale agreement for the apartment at NIS 2,180,000 and an irrevocable power of attorney authorising the transfer. Nobody told the children. They found out in April, when the daughter pulled a routine Land Registry extract, a nesach tabu, online for NIS 15 before arranging a live-in carer, and saw a caveat registered against the property in a stranger's name.

The Challenge

Two things made this much harder than it sounds. The first is that a notarised document in Israel is not merely a signed document. Section 19 of the Notaries Law 5736-1976 provides that a notarial certificate is sufficient evidence in legal proceedings, without further proof, of the notary's own words and acts and of the words and acts of others said or done in his presence, as recorded in the certificate. So the starting position was that an Israeli notary had certified that this woman appeared before him, understood what she was signing, and signed of her own free will, and it was for the children to displace that. A NIS 197 signature-authentication fee under the Notaries Regulations (Service Fees) 5738-1978 was carrying a transaction worth NIS 2.75M.

The second is the nature of what she signed. An irrevocable power of attorney is built precisely so that it survives the principal's change of mind, and by the time the children saw the extract the buyer had already registered a caveat under Section 126 of the Land Law 5729-1969 on the strength of the sale agreement. A caveat is not ownership, but it blocks any competing registration and it puts the burden on whoever wants it removed. Meanwhile the mother herself could not instruct anyone. She was back at home with round-the-clock care, fluctuating, and on her worse days had no memory of February at all. Her children were 9,500 kilometres away with no legal standing over her affairs whatsoever, because a US durable power of attorney signed in Illinois in 2019 had never been recognised in Israel and, in any event, Israeli institutions do not treat a foreign durable instrument as a substitute for a continuing power of attorney made under Israeli law.

The undervalue was the thing that made us look harder rather than negotiate. A licensed appraiser, a shamai mekarke'in, valued the apartment at NIS 2,750,000 as at February 2025, for a fee of NIS 3,500. The contract price was NIS 570,000 below that, a discount of about 21%, on a property with no encumbrances and no urgency to sell.

In Practice: Regulation 4(e) of the Notaries Regulations 5737-1977 forbids a notary from certifying an act of a person who is hospitalised in a hospital or confined to bed unless a medical certificate in the form set out in the First Schedule, issued on the day the act is performed, is produced to him, and that certificate must be attached to the copy of the notarial certificate the notary retains. Where it is absent, the Section 19 evidential presumption cannot do the work it usually does. It took eleven days and a written demand from the guardian to obtain the copy from the notary's file, and it contained no medical certificate of any kind.

What We Did

Nothing could be demanded from the notary, the buyer or the Land Registry until somebody had authority to act for the mother, so that came first. In May 2025 we filed an application in the Family Court for the district in which she lived, seeking the appointment of her daughter as guardian for property and personal matters under Section 33(a)(4) of the Legal Capacity and Guardianship Law 5722-1962. The application was drafted to meet Section 33A, the least-restrictive-alternative gate added by Amendment 18 and in force since 11 April 2017, so we sought guardianship over property only in the first instance rather than a blanket order. A geriatric psychiatrist's opinion and a welfare officer's report were filed. The court heard the mother at home, as Section 36 requires. The order issued in July 2025. The court fee was about NIS 550, and the Administrator General (Apotropos Klali) opened a supervision file, with the property inventory, the pratah, due within thirty days.

The children could not attend any of it. Both signed the application and the accompanying affidavits before a notary public in Illinois, had them apostilled by the Illinois Secretary of State, and couriered them to us for notarial translation into Hebrew at NIS 251 for the first hundred words. The daughter attended the Family Court hearing by video link, which the court permitted on request.

With the guardianship order in hand, we wrote to the notary demanding the copy of the notarial certificate and everything attached to it, which a notary must retain. What came back was a clean certificate of signature authentication with nothing behind it. There was no medical certificate, no note of any medical enquiry, and no record that the notary had been told his signatory was an inpatient, even though the certificate itself recorded an address that was the hospital.

That changed the whole shape of the matter. We did three things at once. We commissioned a retrospective capacity opinion from a geriatric psychiatrist who reviewed the hospital file for the admission, including the nursing notes for 17 and 18 February. We filed a written complaint with the Notaries Department at the Ministry of Justice, which supervises notaries' licences. And we sent the buyer's lawyer a pre-action letter enclosing the draft statement of claim we intended to file in the District Court, the appraisal, the notary's file as produced, and the psychiatric opinion, together with an offer to delete the caveat by consent.

In Practice: Section 132(a) of the Land Law 5729-1969 provides that a caveat registered under Section 126 is deleted by court order, or by the Registrar where he is satisfied that the interested parties have consented or that the ground for the caveat has lapsed. A consent deletion is the fast route: the application is filed at the registry office holding the record, in this case the Netanya Land Registry, verified by a lawyer in the manner a transaction deed is verified, and it was registered twelve working days after filing. Litigating the same point in the District Court, on a property valued at NIS 2,750,000, would have taken eighteen to thirty months and a court fee running to tens of thousands of shekels.

The Outcome

The buyer withdrew in September 2025, six weeks after the pre-action letter. His lawyer's position, sensibly, was that a purchase resting on a bedside notarial certificate with no Regulation 4(e) medical certificate behind it was not a purchase he could advise his client to defend, still less register. The parties signed a consent application under Section 132(a)(1), and the Netanya Land Registry deleted the caveat in October 2025, six months after the daughter first saw it on the extract. The NIS 150,000 deposit sitting in the buyer's lawyer's trust account was returned to him in full, and the sale agreement was cancelled by mutual written release. No money had ever reached the mother's account, which was itself part of the picture.

She kept her apartment. It was valued at NIS 2,750,000 and it is now let, with the rent managed by her daughter as guardian under the Administrator General's supervision, funding the care package that let her stay at home until January 2026, when she moved into assisted living in Ra'anana. The children's costs came to NIS 61,500: NIS 58,000 in Israeli legal fees across the guardianship and the property work, NIS 3,500 for the appraisal, and the court and registry fees. Against a NIS 570,000 undervalue on a property they would otherwise have had to litigate to recover, that was the cheap part.

The complaint to the Ministry of Justice was pursued separately and is not something the family controlled or benefited from financially. We filed it because a notary who certifies a bedside signature without the certificate the regulations require will do it again, and the next family may not run a NIS 15 extract in time. What Israeli notarial practice actually requires of a document signed abroad, and of one signed in Israel on a non-resident's behalf, is set out in our guide to the Israeli power of attorney for non-resident property and banking matters.

Key Takeaways

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

1. Run a Land Registry extract on an elderly relative's Israeli property at least twice a year. It costs NIS 15 online, it shows every caveat, and it is the only early warning a family abroad realistically gets.
2. A notarial certificate is strong evidence but not unassailable evidence. Where the signatory was hospitalised or bedridden and no same-day medical certificate is attached to the notary's retained copy, Regulation 4(e) has been breached and the Section 19 presumption stops doing its work.
3. Ask for the notary's file, not just the certificate. The document handed to the buyer looks perfect; what is missing behind it is the point, and only the retained copy shows that.
4. Get standing before you get angry. Nothing could be demanded from the notary, the buyer or the registry until a guardian was appointed under Section 33(a)(4) of the Legal Capacity and Guardianship Law 1962, which took ten weeks.
5. A US durable power of attorney does not travel. Israeli institutions will not accept it in place of an Israeli continuing power of attorney, and it is worth nothing once the principal has lost capacity, which is exactly when families reach for it.

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Facing a Similar Situation?

If a property in Israel belonging to an elderly parent has been sold, transferred or encumbered on a signature you did not know about, the first questions are what the notary's own file contains and whether anyone has standing to demand it.

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