France-Israel Inheritance: Forced Heirship vs Free Will

A Paris family sits with a notaire three months after their father's death. The estate is orderly on paper: an apartment in the 16th, a securities account, and a two-bedroom flat in Tel Aviv he bought after his first visit twenty years ago. The two adult children assume the French rule they grew up hearing about applies to everything he owned. Each is entitled to a reserved share, the réserve héréditaire, and no will can cut them out. Then the notaire reads the Israeli will their father signed in Herzliya, leaving the Tel Aviv flat entirely to the younger daughter, and explains that over that asset, French forced heirship may not help them at all.

This is the fault line that runs through almost every Franco-Israeli estate. France protects children with one of the strongest forced-heirship regimes in the world. Israel does the opposite and grants near-total freedom of testation. When a person with a foot in both countries dies owning an Israeli apartment, the two systems meet, and which one wins depends on rules of private international law that most families have never heard of. Getting this right at the planning stage, rather than discovering it in a notaire's office, is the difference between a clean succession and years of cross-border litigation over a single Israeli will.

Two Legal Traditions in Collision

French succession law starts from protection. The Code civil reserves a fixed portion of the estate for the children, the réserve héréditaire: one child takes half, two children take two-thirds between them, three or more take three-quarters. Only the remaining quotité disponible can be freely willed. A parent in France cannot simply disinherit a child, and a lifetime gift that eats into the réserve can be clawed back after death.

Israeli law begins from freedom. The Succession Law 1965 (Chok HaYerusha) contains no reserved portion, no legitime, and no forced share for children or spouse. A testator may leave everything to one child, to a charity, or to a stranger. The single meaningful limit is a maintenance claim by dependants, which is narrow and discretionary rather than a guaranteed slice of the estate. For a French heir raised on the réserve, this is genuinely disorienting. The instinct that "children cannot be cut out" is correct in Nanterre and simply wrong in Netanya.

The practical question is never abstract. It is: which of these two philosophies governs the Tel Aviv apartment? The answer turns on conflict-of-law rules, and here Israel and France do not speak the same language either.

Which Country's Law Governs Your Israeli Apartment

Israel splits succession by the type of asset. Section 137 of the Succession Law 1965 points, as a general rule, to the law of the deceased's domicile at death to govern the estate. But Israeli courts treat immovable property located in Israel as governed by Israeli law, the law of the place where the land sits, under the lex situs principle preserved in Section 138. For a Tel Aviv apartment, that steers the analysis back to Israeli substantive law, which means the freedom of testation described above.

The consequence is stark for a French family. Even if the father was domiciled in Paris his entire life, the succession of his Israeli real estate is decided under Israeli rules, and Israeli rules recognise no réserve. His French will and his French children's expectations govern the Paris apartment and the securities. They do not automatically reach the flat in Israel.

There is a second track running in parallel. To do anything with the Israeli asset, the family must obtain an Israeli order regardless of what France has issued. A French acte de notoriété or a French court decree has no direct effect on the Israeli Land Registry (Tabu). The heirs, or the person named in the Israeli will, must apply to the Registrar of Inheritance (Rasham HaYerushot) for a will execution order (צו קיום צוואה) or, absent a will, a succession order (צו ירושה).

In Practice: A will execution order on an uncontested Israeli will runs through the Registrar of Inheritance (Rasham HaYerushot) at the Ministry of Justice for a filing fee of roughly NIS 543 plus a publication fee near NIS 130, and typically issues in 3 to 6 months. Where the family instead relies on a French will, the apostille under the 1961 Hague Convention, a certified Hebrew translation, and an opinion on French law can add NIS 4,000 to NIS 9,000 and push the realistic timeline past 8 months, all coordinated from Paris across a time-zone and language gap.

How Israeli Freedom of Testation Works

Read the Succession Law 1965 looking for a reserved share and you will not find one. Section 27 protects the testator's freedom to make and revoke a will, voiding any undertaking that would tie the testator's hands. The estate follows the will. If there is no will, it follows the statutory order of intestacy in Sections 10 to 17, not a protected quota that overrides the deceased's wishes.

So what remains of a French child's expectation? One route, and only one. Sections 56 to 65 of the Succession Law 1965 allow certain dependants, a spouse, minor or dependent children, and in some cases parents, to claim maintenance from the estate (mezonot min ha'izavon). This is not a share of ownership. It is a discretionary allowance the Family Court can order where a dependant was actually supported by the deceased and is left in need. An independent adult child living comfortably in France almost never qualifies. A disabled adult child, or a minor, might.

In Practice: A maintenance claim under Section 56 of the Succession Law 1965 is filed in the Family Court (Beit HaMishpat LeInyanei Mishpacha), which weighs the dependant's actual needs and the size of the estate rather than applying a fixed fraction. On an estate built around a NIS 3M Tel Aviv apartment, contested maintenance proceedings commonly run 6 to 14 months and cost NIS 30,000 to NIS 70,000 in combined legal fees, and the court can decline the claim entirely where the applicant is self-supporting.

The point for planning is that Israeli law will usually honour whatever the Israeli will says. That is a powerful tool and a dangerous one. It lets a parent direct the Israeli apartment precisely. It also lets a parent create, deliberately or by accident, a distribution that would be illegal in France, which is exactly where the cross-border friction begins.

The French Réserve and the 2021 Compensation Right

French law did not sit still while wealthy families moved assets abroad. If the succession of a French person's estate is governed by a foreign law that ignores the réserve, French children are not always left with nothing. Since the law of 24 August 2021, Article 913 of the Code civil gives a reserved heir who is a national or resident of an EU member state a droit de prélèvement compensatoire. In plain terms, the disinherited child can take a compensating amount out of assets located in France, up to the value of the réserve they lost under the foreign law.

Notice what that reaches and what it does not. The prélèvement bites on assets situated in France. It does not order the Israeli Land Registry to transfer a Tel Aviv apartment, and Israel has not signed up to enforce it. So a father who leaves the Israeli flat to one child may still trigger a rebalancing inside the French estate, where the other children draw more from the Paris apartment and the French accounts to make up their reserved portions. Families who assume the Israeli gift is entirely ring-fenced can be surprised when the French side of the estate is redistributed around it.

The EU Succession Regulation 650/2012, often called Brussels IV, adds another layer. It lets a person choose the law of their nationality to govern their whole succession through a professio juris in the will. A French national can elect French law; someone with dual nationality might elect the other. That choice binds the EU states that apply the Regulation. It does not bind Israel, which is a third country and continues to apply Section 137 and Section 138 to the Israeli asset. A well-drafted plan uses the Israeli will for the Israeli asset and the French instruments for the French estate, with each aware of the other, rather than hoping one choice-of-law clause solves both jurisdictions at once. This coordination sits at the heart of inheriting Israeli property as a French resident.

French Inheritance Tax on an Israeli Estate

Israel abolished estate duty in 1981 and levies no inheritance or gift tax. It is tempting to conclude the Israeli apartment passes tax-free. For a French-resident deceased, that conclusion is wrong.

France taxes inheritance at the level of each heir, on worldwide assets, when the deceased was resident in France for tax purposes. Direct-line heirs receive an abatement of EUR 100,000 each, after which droits de succession climb on a sliding scale to 45 percent. The Tel Aviv apartment, being part of the worldwide estate of a French-resident deceased, is drawn into that base even though the property never left Israel. Crucially, the France-Israel treaty is an income-tax treaty and does not cover inheritance tax, so there is no treaty mechanism to allocate the asset to one country or the other.

France does grant relief for foreign death duties actually paid abroad on foreign-situated property under Article 784 A of the Code général des impôts. But because Israel charges no estate tax, there is nothing to credit. The result many families miss: an asset that is tax-neutral on the Israeli side can still carry a substantial French inheritance-tax bill, payable in euros, while the heirs are simultaneously funding the Israeli succession-order process in shekels.

What Often Goes Wrong

The recurring failure is not fraud or bad faith. It is a single will trying to do a job that needs two.

Common Mistake: A French testator signs one French will disposing of "all my worldwide assets" and later signs an Israeli will for the Tel Aviv apartment without a territorial clause in either. Section 36 of the Succession Law 1965 lets a later will revoke an earlier one, so the Israeli will can silently cancel the French dispositions, or the reverse, depending on dates. Untangling which document controls at the Family Court suspends the will execution order for 4 to 10 weeks and, on a NIS 3M estate, has cost families NIS 25,000 to NIS 55,000 in competing representation that a one-paragraph carve-out would have prevented.

Two other errors recur. The first is assuming a French judgment or notarial act will be honoured in Israel without a separate Israeli order; it will not, and the family loses months discovering it. The second is emotional rather than legal: parents draft an Israeli will that disinherits French children on the assumption it is airtight, without accounting for the 2021 prélèvement that quietly rebalances the French estate against those same children's interests. A plan that ignores one side of the border tends to detonate on that side.

Practical Checklist

• Identify which assets sit in France and which sit in Israel, and treat the Israeli real estate as governed by Israeli law from the outset.
• Have an Israeli attorney draft a separate Israeli will covering only the Israeli apartment and accounts, with a territorial clause so it does not revoke your French will.
• Ask your French notaire to add a matching carve-out and to model how the 2021 droit de prélèvement compensatoire would affect the French estate if the Israeli asset is left unequally.
• Decide deliberately whether to respect or depart from the réserve, understanding that Israeli freedom of testation permits either.
• Budget for French droits de succession on the Israeli apartment if the deceased is French-resident, and keep euros available to pay it separately from the shekel costs of the Israeli order.
• Store the original Israeli will where your Israeli executor can reach it, or lodge it with the Registrar of Inheritance for safekeeping.

Speak With an Israeli Attorney

A Franco-Israeli estate is really two estates that have to be planned together. We draft Israeli wills for clients who live in France and never visit our office, coordinate the territorial clauses directly with your notaire, and map how Israeli freedom of testation interacts with the réserve and with French inheritance tax before anything is signed. Doing that now spares your children a two-country dispute later.

Contact us for a confidential initial consultation.