How US Heirs Capped a Maintenance Claim on an Israeli Estate

Result: An open-ended maintenance claim settled as a capitalised NIS 465,000 lump sum, releasing the Herzliya apartment for sale · Timeline: 14 months · Challenge: A lifelong support award would have frozen the whole estate · Authority: Tel Aviv Family Court · Financial Impact: NIS 4.28M estate distributed, roughly NIS 1.15M of exposure avoided

Background

A retired engineer died in Herzliya in early 2025, leaving a will that divided everything between his two adult children, a son in Boston and a daughter outside Denver. Both are US citizens who had visited Israel perhaps twice a decade. The estate was a three-room apartment near Herzliya's Wolfson Street valued at NIS 3.87M, an Israeli bank account holding NIS 410,000, and a small provident fund with a named beneficiary that fell outside the estate entirely. The will execution order issued without objection.

Seven weeks later, an envelope reached the son's Boston address through the Israeli courts. A 68-year-old woman had filed a claim in the Tel Aviv Family Court for maintenance out of the estate, together with an application to restrain any dealing in the apartment. She had lived in that apartment with their father since 2013. Neither child had understood the relationship to be legally significant, and neither had considered that a person who inherits nothing can still be paid first.

The Challenge

Israeli succession law runs two systems side by side. One answers who inherits, and the will settled that. The other answers who needs to be supported, and a will cannot touch it. Chapter Four of the Succession Law 1965, Sections 56 to 65, entitles a surviving spouse, children and dependent parents of the deceased to maintenance out of the estate, and Section 56 applies whether the estate passes on intestacy or under a will. The claim is a charge on the estate. It reduces what the heirs receive before any division happens, which our guide to maintenance claims against an Israeli estate sets out in full.

The word "spouse" was doing the heavy lifting here. Israeli law recognises a reputed spouse, a partner in a shared household who was never married to the deceased, and where that status is established the partner sits inside Section 56 exactly as a widow would. The claimant had eleven years of joint utility bills, a shared bank card, photographs at family occasions and neighbours prepared to swear affidavits. Our clients had a father who never mentioned her in a will drafted in 2019.

Then came the arithmetic that actually frightened them. She asked for NIS 8,500 a month plus a right of residence in the apartment for as long as she did not remarry, which is precisely the entitlement Section 57 contemplates for a surviving spouse. On the actuarial tables an award of that size to a woman of 68 capitalises to somewhere between NIS 1.4M and NIS 1.7M, and the residence right would have made the apartment unsaleable for the rest of her life. The interim application, if granted in full, would have frozen the estate on day one.

Distance made everything slower and more expensive. Both heirs were in the United States, neither reads Hebrew, and the evidence that decides these cases sits in Israel: bank statements, medical files, tenancy records, the neighbours on the landing. She had all of it. They had a will and a plane ticket.

In Practice: Under Sections 56 and 57 of the Succession Law 1965, a partner who establishes reputed-spouse status obtains an award that runs for as long as widowhood continues, and on an estate of this size a monthly figure in the NIS 4,000 to NIS 8,500 range plus a right of residence is the ordinary range at the Tel Aviv Family Court. Section 59 requires the court to weigh the value of the estate, the claimant's own property and income and any other sources of support available to her. A contested claim of this kind takes 8 to 18 months to judgment, and the court will restrain dealings in estate property while it is pending.

What We Did

We were instructed nine days after service, which mattered more than anything else that followed.

Powers of attorney first, arguments later. Each heir signed a power of attorney before a notary in their own state, apostilled by the Massachusetts Secretary of the Commonwealth and the Colorado Secretary of State respectively. Both documents were couriered to Tel Aviv inside eleven days, which let us file a defence in time and appear at the first interim hearing without either client travelling.

We did not fight the status. This is the decision that saved the file. Attacking reputed-spouse status on eleven years of shared life is expensive, it hardens the other side, and it usually fails. The money in a maintenance claim is almost never in whether the claimant qualifies. It is in Section 59, which measures the award against her actual resources, and in Section 61, which lets the court choose the form the payment takes. We conceded the status in writing at the first hearing and spent the budget on the two provisions that decide the number.

We built the resources picture from Israeli public records. A Land Registry extract (נסח טאבו, nesach tabu) showed that the claimant owned a two-room apartment in Ramat Gan in her sole name, let out on a standing tenancy at NIS 4,200 a month. Her National Insurance Institute old-age pension added roughly NIS 3,100 a month. The deceased had transferred NIS 240,000 to her personal account fourteen months before death, which the bank confirmed on a court order. None of this had appeared in her affidavit of need.

We narrowed the freeze instead of opposing it. Rather than argue that the apartment should be free to sell, which we would have lost, we agreed that the apartment stay untouched and asked instead for release of the bank account against a retention. The court released NIS 160,000 to the heirs and left NIS 250,000 in the lawyer's trust account as security. That single order stopped the case from being decided by whoever could afford to wait.

We used the court-annexed process to convert the claim into a number. At the second hearing the judge referred the parties to mediation with a strong indication that an award, if made, would fall well below the sum claimed given the Ramat Gan rental income. Three sessions produced a capitalised lump sum. Nobody in the family had to be cross-examined.

In Practice: Section 61 of the Succession Law 1965 permits the Family Court to order maintenance as periodic payments, as a lump sum, or as a combination, with power to attach conditions and require security, which is what makes a capitalised settlement available at all. Section 65 then makes court approval a condition of validity for any post-death agreement about maintenance, so the settlement had to be filed at the Tel Aviv Family Court and approved rather than simply signed. Approval of a settlement of this kind took five weeks from filing, and Israeli legal costs across the whole defence came to NIS 62,000 for both heirs together, against a claim that capitalised at roughly NIS 1.6M.

The Outcome

The claimant accepted NIS 465,000 as a single capitalised payment in full and final settlement of her rights under Sections 56 to 65, together with vacant possession of the apartment within 90 days and a contribution of NIS 18,000 to her costs. The Tel Aviv Family Court approved the settlement under Section 65 after satisfying itself that she had been separately represented throughout. The restraint on the apartment was discharged the same week.

The apartment sold eight weeks after that for NIS 3.87M. Because both sellers were non-residents, the purchaser was obliged to withhold an advance against the sellers' tax under Section 15(b) of the Real Estate Taxation Law 1963, so we applied for a reduced withholding certificate (אישור ניכוי, ishur nikui) from the Netanya real estate taxation office and released the funds against it. Each heir received NIS 1.73M net of the settlement, costs and taxes, transferred to their US accounts on the strength of the tax clearance the bank required. Both filed Form 3520 with the IRS, which a US person must do on receipt of more than USD 100,000 from a foreign estate, and neither owed US federal estate tax on a non-US decedent's Israeli assets.

Fourteen months elapsed between service of the claim and distribution. Had the matter run to judgment on a periodic award, the apartment would still have been standing empty and unsaleable, with a monthly obligation running against two people living 9,000 kilometres away.

Key Takeaways

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

1. Ask who was living with the deceased before you apply for the succession order, not after. A partner who was never married, a carer, an adult disabled sibling or an elderly parent whose nursing fees the deceased was quietly paying are all potential Section 56 claimants. Every one of them is cheaper to assess before proceedings than to discover through a court file.
2. Conceding status is often the cheapest move available. Where the shared household is long and documented, fighting reputed-spouse status burns the budget that Section 59 and Section 61 actually reward. Spend it on the claimant's own income and property instead.
3. Push for a capitalised lump sum from the first hearing. An open-ended monthly order under Section 57 keeps the estate open, keeps the property unsaleable, and keeps heirs abroad exposed for decades. Section 61 gives the court the power to close the file, but only if somebody asks.
4. Do not distribute selectively while a claim is live, and do not assume distribution ends the risk. Section 60 lets the court entertain a claim for six months after distribution, and Section 63 allows gifts made without adequate consideration in the two years before death to be treated as estate property. Money already converted and spent has to be repaid personally.
5. Get any settlement approved by the court. Section 65 voids a lifetime waiver outright and makes judicial approval a condition of a post-death agreement, so a private release signed between the parties is worth very little on its own.

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Facing a Similar Situation?

If someone was living with your relative in Israel, or depended on them financially, the succession order is not the end of your file. It is the point at which the exposure becomes measurable, and the assessment is worth far more before the estate is distributed than afterwards. The same is true of an Israeli estate carrying debts or creditor claims, which follows the same logic and the same deadlines.

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