Claiming Holocaust Victims' Assets in Israel as a Foreign Heir

A woman in Toronto wrote to me about a grandfather she never met. He had run a business in Frankfurt, bought shares in a Palestine bank through a Zionist purchasing agent in 1936, and was murdered at Auschwitz in 1943. The family assumed everything was lost with him. It was not. Some of what he bought had been sitting in Israel for eighty years, recorded against his name, waiting for someone to prove they were his.

That story is more common than people imagine, and it is surrounded by a stubborn myth: that the chance to recover a Holocaust victim's Israeli assets ended when the restitution company shut its doors in 2017. It did not. The law that created the framework is still in force, the record of assets still exists, and heirs abroad can still claim. What changed is who you deal with and how much of the work now falls on the family rather than on a dedicated agency.

This is a distinct track from the ordinary recovery of a forgotten Israeli bank account or provident fund, which follows different law and a different authority. If your question is about a relative's dormant account rather than a Holocaust-era asset, the process is set out separately in our guide to finding dormant Israeli assets as a foreign heir. This article is about the specific regime built for the property of Holocaust victims.

The Law That Actually Governs This

There is a great deal of loose talk online about an Israeli "dormant assets law" said to cover Holocaust property. For this subject, that is not the instrument that matters. The governing statute is the Assets of Holocaust Victims (Restitution to Heirs and Dedication for Aid and Commemoration) Law 5766-2006.

The 2006 law did something unusual. It ordered banks, companies, and other Israeli bodies to search their own records for assets that had belonged to people who perished in the Holocaust, to report them, and to hand them to a purpose-built company that would locate the heirs and return the property. That company was the Company for Location and Restitution of Holocaust Victims' Assets Ltd, known in Israel as Hashava (השבה, "restitution"). It was incorporated in 2006 and worked actively from 2007.

The assets it went looking for were the residue of a whole world of pre-war Jewish investment in the Land of Israel. European Jews, many of whom never managed to emigrate, had opened accounts at the Anglo-Palestine Bank and its successors, bought shares, and acquired land through the land-purchase campaigns of the 1920s and 1930s. When the owners were murdered and no relative came forward, the money and the land simply stayed on the books under the dead owner's name, sometimes for generations.

In Practice: Under the Assets of Holocaust Victims (Restitution to Heirs and Dedication for Aid and Commemoration) Law 5766-2006, Hashava located assets valued at roughly NIS 2.1 billion, including hundreds of parcels of land, but restituted only about NIS 718 million to identified heirs. The company ceased operations on 31 December 2017 by force of the statute itself, and its residual functions passed to the Administrator General (HaApotropus HaKlali) at the Ministry of Justice. That handover is the single fact most families get wrong: closure of the company did not close the claim, it moved the counter.

Why "Too Late" Is the Wrong Way to Think About It

When people hear that Hashava wound up at the end of 2017, they hear a deadline. There was no deadline for heirs. The company had a statutory lifespan; the right of an heir to reclaim their family's property did not expire with it.

What genuinely erodes with time is proof. A claim has two halves that have nothing to do with each other. The first is showing that a particular asset belonged to a particular Holocaust victim, and that half is largely fixed in the historical record Hashava assembled. The second is showing that you are that victim's lawful heir, and that half gets harder every year. It usually means reconstructing a family tree across three or four generations and several countries, with a civil document to evidence each link, at a point when the people who remembered the family firsthand are gone and archives in Europe have their own gaps.

So the urgency is real, but it is evidential rather than legal. The families who struggle are not the ones who "missed a date." They are the ones who waited until nobody was left who could explain how the Frankfurt grandfather connected to the Toronto granddaughter.

Searching: The List That Outlived the Company

The practical starting point is the asset list that Hashava built and published. It was organised by the name of the last known owner, the country where that person last lived, and the type of asset. That structure tells you how to search: not only by the exact name as you know it, but by the spellings a German, Polish, or Hungarian clerk might have used, and by the transliterations an Israeli bank might have entered decades ago.

Names are the whole problem and the whole solution. A victim recorded in Israel as "Yisrael Rosenberg" may appear in your family's papers as "Israel Rozenberg" or under a Hebraised or Yiddish variant. A methodical search runs every plausible variant, because the asset is filed under whatever a clerk wrote long ago, not under the name on your own birth certificate.

Where an asset does not appear on the public list, an Israeli attorney can go further: querying the Administrator General's records for property transferred out of Hashava, and making direct enquiries to the banks that succeeded the old Mandate-era institutions. Israeli banks will not discuss a named person's holdings with a foreign relative who cannot yet show authority to act, which is why this stage almost always runs through a local lawyer holding your power of attorney.

In Practice: A search of the Administrator General's Holocaust-assets records and the relevant banks, run by an Israeli attorney holding a notarised and apostilled power of attorney, typically produces an initial picture within 4 to 8 weeks. There is no fee to search the public asset list itself. Where an asset is identified, the file then waits on the slower half of the work, assembling the apostilled civil documents that prove the chain of heirs, which is what usually sets the real timetable rather than anything on the Israeli side.

Proving You Are the Heir: The Succession Order

Identifying an asset does not release it. Before an Israeli bank, company, or the Administrator General will transfer a Holocaust victim's property, they need a formal determination of who the heirs are. In Israel that determination is a succession order (tzav yerusha), issued for an intestate estate by the Inheritance Registrar (Rasham HaYerushot).

For a victim who died in the 1940s leaving no will, the order has to trace inheritance forward through everyone who has since died in the line. If the victim's child inherited and then died, that child's own heirs step into the share, and each of those deaths needs its own documentary proof. This is where foreign heirs feel the distance most sharply. Every birth, marriage, and death certificate generated outside Israel has to be apostilled in the country that issued it and translated into Hebrew before the Registrar will accept it.

In Practice: Under Section 66 of the Succession Law 1965, the Inheritance Registrar (Rasham HaYerushot) issues the succession order that fixes the heirs, on an application costing NIS 597 (or NIS 507 filed online) plus a NIS 66 publication fee, with a statutory objection period of at least two weeks after publication under Section 67. An uncontested application generally takes 3 to 6 months. Where the chain runs through several deceased generations in different countries, expect the front-end work of gathering and apostilling the civil records to take considerably longer than the Registrar's own processing.

Because the deceased was domiciled abroad, a question of governing law can arise. Under Section 137 of the Succession Law 1965, the law of the deceased's domicile at death governs the succession, subject to the statute's own rules. In most Holocaust claims the practical effect is limited, because the point in issue is who the heirs are rather than which country's forced-heirship rules apply, but it is a reason to have the family tree assessed by an Israeli lawyer before the papers are filed.

Filing the Claim and What Comes Back

With the succession order in hand and the asset identified, the claim itself goes to the Administrator General's unit that took over Hashava's files. The claim ties the two halves together: here is the asset recorded against the victim, and here is the order showing that we are that victim's heirs.

What comes back depends on the asset. A bank balance or a securities holding is paid or transferred once title is proven. Land is more involved, because a parcel recorded against a victim's name may need its registration corrected at the Land Registry (Tabu) before it can be dealt with, and some parcels were absorbed into other ownership over the decades in ways that have to be untangled. Cash and financial assets are the cleaner recoveries; real estate rewards patience.

One feature of this regime sets it apart from ordinary escheat. Assets that no heir ever claims are not quietly kept by the Treasury as windfall. The 2006 law dedicates them to a defined purpose: help for needy Holocaust survivors living in Israel, and Holocaust commemoration, education, and research. That is the destination of the large unclaimed balance, and it is one reason the state has an interest in genuine heirs coming forward rather than in assets lapsing.

Common Mistake: Treating the 2017 closure of Hashava as the end of the road and never checking. Because the company was wound up, families assume the assets reverted permanently to the state and stop looking, when in fact the Administrator General still holds those assets and still processes heirs' claims. The cost of the assumption is not a rejected claim, it is an unmade one: the asset stays classified as unclaimed and, in time, its value is redirected to the survivors' and commemoration funds. The remedy is simply to search the record and, if a name matches, to obtain the succession order and file, none of which depends on a deadline that never existed.

The Cross-Border Reality

Nearly everything in a Holocaust-assets claim straddles borders, which is exactly why it stalls for families who try to manage it informally.

The evidence lives in your country and the asset lives in Israel. You cannot appear at the Inheritance Registrar or at the Administrator General from abroad, so you act through an Israeli attorney under a power of attorney that you sign before a notary at home and have apostilled. The civil records that build the chain of heirs come from wherever your family scattered to after the war, each needing its own apostille from the issuing state and a Hebrew translation. Where a European archive holds a wartime or pre-war record of the victim, obtaining and authenticating it is often the slowest single step, and it is one an experienced practitioner will start early rather than last.

None of this is beyond a family working from Toronto, Melbourne, or Buenos Aires. It simply has to be sequenced correctly: search first, assess the family line, gather and apostille the documents, obtain the succession order, then file. Families who file before they can prove the line, or who prove the line before they have confirmed the asset, spend money in the wrong order.

Practical Checklist

• Gather the family's own papers first: names and name variants of the victim, where they last lived, and anything showing a pre-war connection to a Palestine bank, company, or land purchase
• Search the published Hashava asset list under every spelling and transliteration of the victim's name, not just the version on your own documents
• Appoint an Israeli attorney under a notarised, apostilled power of attorney to query the Administrator General's records and the successor banks
• Map the chain of heirs from the victim down to the living claimants, and identify every death in the line that needs its own certificate
• Obtain each foreign birth, marriage, and death certificate with an apostille and a certified Hebrew translation
• Apply for the Israeli succession order through the Inheritance Registrar before filing the restitution claim
• Treat land differently from cash: expect a separate Land Registry correction and a longer timeline for any real estate
• Do not assume the 2017 closure ended anything; the assets are still held and still claimable

Speak With an Israeli Attorney

Recovering a Holocaust victim's assets in Israel is part historical research and part inheritance law, and the two have to be handled together. The hardest part is rarely the Israeli filing; it is proving the family line from a victim who died in Europe to the heirs alive today, with every document apostilled and translated to a standard the Inheritance Registrar and the Administrator General will accept. We conduct the search, obtain the succession order, and file the restitution claim on behalf of families abroad.

Contact us for a confidential initial consultation about locating and claiming a Holocaust victim's assets in Israel.