US Heirs Export an Inherited Jerusalem Antiquities Collection in 11 Months

Result: 63 permitted antiquities and 41 unregulated Judaica shipped to the United States, 4 refused pieces sold in Israel for NIS 74,000, 4 surrendered without charge · Timeline: 11 months · Challenge: Inherited antiquities cannot lawfully leave Israel unpermitted · Authority: Israel Antiquities Authority and the Inheritance Registrar (Rasham HaYerushot) · Financial Impact: NIS 384,000 collection preserved and lawfully released

Background

Our clients were three siblings, two in the Boston area and one outside Chicago. Their father died in Jerusalem on 12 February 2025 at the age of 88. He had lived in the same Rehavia flat since 1969, and the flat itself was the smaller part of what he left behind. Along one wall of the study stood four glass cabinets holding 112 objects: Roman oil lamps, Hasmonean and Herodian bronze coins, Byzantine glass, a handful of clay figurines, and a group of nineteenth-century silver Judaica that the family had always described in the same breath as the rest. None of the siblings had lived in Israel. The eldest had visited the flat twice in fifteen years. Their instinct, expressed in the first email our office received, was to have a shipping company crate everything and send it to Massachusetts.

That instinct is how these files end in a seizure at Ben Gurion.

The Challenge

Israeli antiquities law draws its line by date of manufacture, not by beauty or value. Section 1 of the Antiquities Law 5738-1978 defines an antiquity as an object made by man before the year 1700. The Roman lamps and the Hasmonean bronzes fell inside that definition. The 1890s Galician Torah crown, the Warsaw kiddush cups and the two Damascus-work spice boxes fell outside it entirely and were, in law, ordinary household goods. Of the 112 objects, 71 turned out to be regulated and 41 were not, and no one in the family had ever drawn that distinction.

For the regulated 71, Section 22 prohibits taking an antiquity out of Israel without written approval, given by the Director of the Israel Antiquities Authority for ordinary pieces and by the Minister where an item is of national value. Section 37 backs the prohibition with criminal penalties reaching imprisonment. The harder provision is Section 2. Anything found in Israel after the law came into force in 1978 is state property, which means it was never the father's to own and never the siblings' to inherit, however long it had sat in a cabinet in Rehavia. Ownership therefore had to be proved item by item, and the burden sat with the family. Receipts existed for 52 pieces bought between 1971 and 1986 from a dealer in the Old City licensed under Section 15. Nineteen had nothing at all.

Two other problems ran alongside the archaeology. The collection was estate property before it was anyone's property, so nothing could be released, permitted or sold until an Israeli succession order issued. And all three heirs lived 9,000 kilometres away, while the objects themselves had to be physically available in Jerusalem for inspection by an authority that does not accept photographs in place of a viewing.

In Practice: Under Section 66 of the Succession Law 5725-1965 an uncontested estate is handled by the Inheritance Registrar (Rasham HaYerushot) rather than the Family Court. The application cost NIS 520 with a further NIS 130 for the statutory newspaper publication, and the order issued 4 months and 9 days after filing. Nothing in the antiquities file could complete before it, because the Israel Antiquities Authority will not name an applicant as owner of an inherited object without one.

What We Did

The first step was a separation, not an application. An Israeli appraiser specialising in classical material catalogued all 112 objects across two days in the flat in April 2025, photographed each one against a scale, and produced a schedule marking every item as pre-1700 or post-1700 with reasons. That schedule cost NIS 11,400 and it did more work than anything else in the file. The 41 unregulated Judaica pieces were removed from the antiquities question altogether and later shipped as ordinary insured household effects, with no permit and no Authority involvement.

We then built the provenance file for the remaining 71 before speaking to anyone in Jerusalem. This is the sequencing that matters, and it is the opposite of what most families do. An approach to the Authority is not a neutral event: the Theft Prevention Unit reads an application as a declaration, and an application covering an undocumented recent find invites a seizure rather than a permit. Our clients gave us the father's 1970s and 1980s receipts, two insurance schedules from 1994 and 2007 listing individual pieces, and a 1983 letter from the dealer confirming a purchase of nine lamps. Between the paper and the appraiser's typological dating, 63 items were supportable as lawfully held before 1978.

The remaining eight were the real work. Four were plainly old acquisitions with lost paperwork, corroborated by their appearance in the 1994 insurance schedule. Four were not, and the appraiser's view was that they had probably come out of the ground in the 1990s. We advised the siblings to surrender those four voluntarily, in writing, with the appraiser's opinion attached and a covering letter explaining that the heirs had no knowledge of their origin and were not asserting title. That decision cost them objects worth about NIS 21,000. It also kept the file out of the Theft Prevention Unit's criminal channel, which was worth considerably more.

The succession order application went in parallel in May 2025, filed by our office under a power of attorney signed by each sibling before a notary public in their home state, certified by the county clerk, apostilled by the Secretary of State, and translated in Israel at NIS 251 for the first hundred words and NIS 197 per hundred thereafter. No one flew in for it.

The export application itself was lodged in November 2025 once the order had issued, listing 67 items with the provenance schedule, the appraisal, the succession order and the heirs' written agreement appointing the eldest sister as the applicant. The Authority inspected the collection in the flat in December, photographed and registered each piece, and gave its decision in January 2026.

In Practice: Section 22 of the Antiquities Law 5738-1978 requires the written approval of the Director of the Israel Antiquities Authority, whose offices for these applications sit at the Rockefeller Museum in Jerusalem, before a single antiquity leaves the country. Physical inspection is part of the process and photographs are not a substitute. On this collection, appraised at NIS 384,000 in total, the permit file ran 10 weeks from lodging to decision, which is the normal range where provenance documents are complete, against six months or more where they are not. Section 15 licensed dealers are the only lawful commercial route for anything the Authority refuses to release.

The Outcome

The Director permitted 63 items for export. Four were refused: a Herodian inscribed stone weight and three Byzantine glass vessels that the Authority classified as having national value, a classification that does not dispute private ownership and simply keeps the objects in the country. Those four were consigned to a Section 15 licensed dealer in Jerusalem in March 2026 and sold for NIS 74,000, which the siblings divided in the same proportions as the rest of the estate. The four surrendered pieces were collected by the Authority in February 2026, and no proceedings followed.

The permitted 63 travelled in a single insured air shipment in April 2026 at a cost of NIS 18,500, declared on arrival to US Customs and Border Protection with the Israeli permit attached to the entry documents. The 41 Judaica pieces went in the same consignment as unregulated goods. Total legal costs came to NIS 26,000, and the whole matter ran 11 months from the first email to the delivery in Massachusetts.

What the family avoided is harder to put a number on. Had the collection been crated in March 2025 as the siblings first intended, the four undocumented pieces would have converted a family shipment into a criminal file under Section 37, and the entire consignment, including the wholly lawful Judaica and the 63 permitted antiquities, would have been seized at the port together. The rest of the estate followed the ordinary path we describe for registering and transferring inherited Israeli property to US heirs, and the threshold questions the siblings should have asked at the outset are set out in our answer on shipping an inherited antiquities collection out of Israel.

Key Takeaways

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

1. Have the collection dated before you have it valued or packed. Section 1 of the Antiquities Law 5738-1978 regulates objects made before 1700 and ignores everything after, and in this file that single line removed 41 of 112 objects from the regulatory system at a stroke.
2. Build the provenance file before you contact the Israel Antiquities Authority, not after. An application is treated as a declaration, and an undocumented post-1978 find inside it draws the Theft Prevention Unit rather than a permit.
3. Surrender what cannot be defended, in writing and early. Four items worth about NIS 21,000 were given up voluntarily here, and that letter is the reason the other 67 were assessed as an ownership question instead of a theft question.
4. Run the succession order and the export application at the same time. Each takes months, the Authority will not issue a permit to an heir who cannot prove entitlement, and heirs who wait for one before starting the other add half a year for nothing.
5. Treat a refusal on national-value grounds as a sale decision, not a defeat. Refused pieces remain privately owned and can be sold inside Israel through a Section 15 licensed dealer, which in this file returned NIS 74,000 that no appeal would have improved on.

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Facing a Similar Situation?

If a parent's Israeli flat contains coins, lamps, glass or anything else that might predate 1700, the shipping question and the inheritance question have to be answered together, and the order in which you approach the authorities decides how the file ends.

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