How US Heirs Recovered NIS 1.34M of a Holocaust Victim's Israeli Assets

Result: NIS 1,340,000 in Holocaust-era Israeli assets released to three American heirs · Timeline: 19 months · Challenge: No death certificate, no proven chain of heirs · Authority: Administrator General, Ministry of Justice · Financial Impact: NIS 1,340,000

Background

Three siblings in their fifties, living in Baltimore, Chicago and outside Boston, had grown up hearing that a great-uncle "bought land in Palestine before the war." Nobody in the family had ever seen a document. The eldest sibling typed the family surname into the published list of located Holocaust victims' assets one evening in October 2024 and found an entry with the right name, the right town of last residence, and two asset lines: a parcel of agricultural land in the Haifa district registered in 1935, and a deposit account opened at a Mandate-era bank in 1937.

The great-uncle had lived in Lwów and was killed in 1942. There was no death certificate, no will, and no living person who had met him. His only sibling was the siblings' grandmother, who reached New York in 1939 and died in 1988. Between the entry on a public list and money in three American bank accounts sat a chain of proof that nobody had ever assembled.

The combined value on the file, once the parcel was valued and the deposit was linked, came to NIS 1,340,000.

The Challenge

The statute behind that list is the Assets of Holocaust Victims (Restitution to Heirs and Dedication for Aid and Commemoration) Law 5766-2006. Section 2 defines an asset of a Holocaust victim as property located in Israel whose last known owner came from one of the countries in the First Schedule and who disappeared or died between 1 September 1939 and 31 December 1945. The great-uncle fitted the definition precisely. What had changed was the machinery.

Section 3 of that Law created the restitution company known as Hashava, and Section 60 fixed the end of its life at 31 December 2017. It located roughly NIS 2.1 billion in assets and returned roughly NIS 718 million before it closed. Section 64 moved the undistributed assets and the open claims to the Administrator General (Apotropos HaKlali) at the Ministry of Justice, where a small department still handles them. Families read the 2017 date as a closing bell. It was not one. No provision extinguishes a valid heir's claim on that date, and claims continue to be paid.

The real obstacle was evidentiary, and it had three layers. First, Israeli law needed a determination that the great-uncle had died and when, because a succession order cannot issue for a person who is not legally dead. Second, someone had to prove that two American siblings' grandmother was his sister and that these three claimants were her descendants, across two countries, three generations and a destroyed civil registry. Third, the claim included real property, which closed off every shortcut.

That third point deserves emphasis, because it decides how much work a claim needs. Under Regulation 3 of the Assets of Holocaust Victims (Succession Matters) Regulations 5769-2008, an asset that is not real property and is worth less than NIS 200,000 can be released without a full succession order. The deposit account, linked and valued at NIS 160,000, would have qualified on its own. The parcel of land did not, and its presence on the same file pulled the whole claim onto the full route.

In Practice: Under Section 60 of the Assets of Holocaust Victims Law 5766-2006 the restitution company ceased operating on 31 December 2017, and Section 64 transferred its files to the Administrator General at the Ministry of Justice, which is where a claim is now opened. Of roughly NIS 2.1 billion in assets located, only about NIS 718 million was ever restituted, and a substantial part of the remainder is unclaimed for want of proof rather than want of heirs. In this matter the Administrator General's file opened within 6 weeks of our written claim, and the department then waited, correctly, for the two Israeli court orders that were the real work.

What We Did

We worked the claim in three tracks that ran partly in parallel rather than in sequence, because each one takes months and none of them depends on a finished version of the others.

Track one: proving the death. Israel has a dedicated statute for exactly this problem. The Declarations of Death Law 5738-1978 defines a nispeh shnot haShoah in Section 1 as a person whose last residence was in Asia, Europe or Africa and whose traces disappeared between 1939 and 1945 in circumstances giving reason to believe they died as a result of the war or of racial, religious, political or national persecution. Section 2 gives the Family Court jurisdiction on the application of an interested party or the Attorney General where the person's last assets were in Israel, which was true here because of the parcel. Section 3 sets the date of death, and where evidence is missing it defaults for a Holocaust victim to the date of disappearance. Section 5 lets the court depart from the ordinary rules of evidence, with reasons recorded, and that section is the reason these applications succeed at all.

The evidence package for the Haifa Family Court ran to 74 pages: two Pages of Testimony filed at Yad Vashem in 1957 and 1971 by different relatives, a certified extract from the Arolsen Archives, a 1946 relief-organisation list showing the household as not surviving, the 1935 land purchase file with his signature and Lwów address, and a sworn affidavit from the eldest sibling. The court granted the declaration in July 2025, fixing the date of death in 1942.

Track two: proving the heirs. A Polish-speaking genealogist reconstructed the family from surviving Galician vital records, a 1930 residence registration, and the grandmother's 1939 US immigration file, which named her brother and her parents. The three claimants supplied their own birth certificates and their mother's death certificate. Those documents came from three different states, and each state's Secretary of State issued its own apostille, which is a step American families reliably get wrong by sending everything to Washington. Every document then went through notarial translation into Hebrew at NIS 251 for the first 100 words and NIS 197 for each additional hundred.

Track three: the succession order and the choice of law. We applied to the Inheritance Registrar under Section 66 of the Succession Law 1965 for a succession order, at NIS 507 for the online application plus the NIS 66 publication fee, with the objection period under Section 67 running not less than two weeks from publication. The file did not stay with the Registrar. Section 137 of the Succession Law applies the law of the deceased's domicile at death, and his domicile in 1942 was Lwów, so foreign law had to be applied and the Registrar transferred the file to the Family Court.

Here the case split in two, and the split saved months of argument. Section 138 reserves succession to immovable property in Israel to Israeli law whatever the deceased's domicile, so the Haifa parcel passed under Israeli intestacy rules and needed no foreign-law analysis at all. Only the bank deposit, as movable property, followed the law of his domicile. We commissioned a written opinion on which succession regime governed Lwów in 1942, and the answer was not the obvious one: interwar Poland never unified its private law, and the former Austrian partition, Galicia included, continued to apply the Austrian Civil Code. On the facts, both systems produced the same three claimants in the same shares, which we said plainly in the pleadings rather than leaving the court to discover it.

In Practice: A succession order or will execution order is granted by the Inheritance Registrar (Rasham HaYerushot) under Section 66 of the Succession Law 1965 at NIS 507 online, or NIS 597 on paper, plus a NIS 66 publication fee, with not less than two weeks for objections under Section 67. Where foreign law must be applied under Section 137, the file leaves the Registrar for the Family Court, which added about four months here. Section 138 is the provision that rescues most of these files: Israeli immovable property is governed by Israeli law regardless of domicile, so the land moved while the foreign-law question was still open.

The succession order issued in November 2025. We filed the certified order, the declaration of death and the genealogical chain with the Administrator General, and the department's own verification took a further four months.

The Outcome

The Haifa parcel was registered in the three siblings' names at the Land Registry in April 2026, and the deposit, index-linked from 1937, was paid out at NIS 160,000. An independent valuation put the parcel at NIS 1,180,000, giving a combined recovery of NIS 1,340,000 nineteen months after the eldest sibling first ran the search.

Total costs came to NIS 92,850: NIS 62,000 in Israeli legal fees, NIS 9,500 for the genealogist, NIS 14,000 for the foreign-law opinion, NIS 6,800 in notarial translations, and roughly NIS 550 in Family Court fees. On the US side, the receipt of a bequest from a non-resident alien's estate above USD 100,000 in aggregate goes on Form 3520, and the siblings' accountants filed it for the year of distribution. Inherited capital is not income to them, but the reporting obligation exists independently of any tax.

What the family had assumed was a sentimental dead end turned out to be a live claim with a documented paper trail. What it did not turn out to be was fast, and the reason is worth stating: nothing in the file was contested. Nineteen months was the cost of proving uncontested facts about people whose records were deliberately destroyed.

Key Takeaways

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

1. The 2017 closure was not a deadline. Section 60 ended the restitution company's life and Section 64 sent its files to the Administrator General. A claim by a provable heir is still opened and still paid; what disappeared was the well-funded body that used to go looking for you.
2. Check whether real property is on the file before budgeting. Regulation 3 of the Succession Matters Regulations 5769-2008 allows release of a non-real asset worth under NIS 200,000 without a succession order. One parcel of land on the same claim removes that option and adds roughly a year.
3. Israel has a purpose-built statute for a missing death certificate. The Declarations of Death Law 5738-1978 was written with Holocaust victims in mind, Section 5 relaxes the rules of evidence, and Yad Vashem Pages of Testimony plus Arolsen Archives records are accepted material. Do not treat the absence of a death certificate as fatal.
4. Section 138 usually does more work than Section 137. Israeli immovable property is governed by Israeli law whatever the deceased's domicile, so foreign-law opinions are needed only for the movable assets. Scoping the opinion to the bank account rather than the whole estate cut its cost by more than half.
5. US documents are apostilled by the state, not the federal government. Certificates from three states meant three Secretaries of State. Sending them to Washington is the single most common cause of a rejected Israeli inheritance file from an American family.

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Facing a Similar Situation?

If a family name appears on the list of located Holocaust victims' assets, the question is never whether the claim is open. It is whether you can prove the death, the relationship and the chain of heirs to an Israeli court's satisfaction, and that is a documentary exercise that starts with archives rather than with lawyers. Our guide to claiming Holocaust victims' assets in Israel as a foreign heir sets out the search and the claim route in full.

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