My mother's live-in caregiver in Israel is demanding severance from the estate. Do we have to pay it from Canada?

Families in Toronto and Vancouver are often startled by this letter, because in their mind the caregiver worked for their mother out of affection and the arrangement ended when she died. Israeli labour law sees a licensed employment relationship that terminated through no fault of the employee, and it attaches money to that. The claim is not against you personally in the first instance. It is against the estate, which is a different thing with different consequences for how quickly you can distribute anything.

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Detailed Answer

Section 4 of the Severance Pay Law 5723-1963 is short and unforgiving. An employee whose employment ceased because of the death or bankruptcy of the employer, or in the case of a corporate employer its liquidation or striking off, is entitled to severance pay as though she had been dismissed. There is no discretion in it and no requirement that anybody behaved badly. The qualifying threshold under Section 1 is one year of continuous service with the same employer, and the standard measure is one month of the last salary for each year worked, with a proportionate part for a broken final year. A live-in caregiver on the statutory minimum, which stands at NIS 6,443 a month from April 2026, generates roughly NIS 38,658 on six years of service. Severance is rarely the whole bill. Unredeemed annual leave, recuperation pay, unpaid notice and employer pension contributions that were never made all sit alongside it, and pension arrears in particular tend to be the larger number in these files because many private households simply never opened a fund. One point cuts the other way and is worth knowing before you concede anything: the Israeli courts have held that the Hours of Work and Rest Law 5711-1951 does not apply to a live-in caregiver who shares the household, so a claim for statutory overtime on the theory that she was available around the clock does not succeed, although the courts do expect a global supplement above the bare minimum wage for the nature of the work.

Where this bites a non-resident heir is the sequence, not the sum. Under Section 126 of the Succession Law 5725-1965 the debts of the estate are paid before anything is divided among the heirs, so a caregiver's claim sits ahead of you in the queue whether or not anyone has issued proceedings yet. If an estate administrator is appointed, Section 123(a) requires a published requisition inviting creditors to come forward, and the caregiver has three months to lodge her claim against the estate. Distributing first and dealing with it later is the mistake we see most from abroad. Section 128 allows a creditor who was not paid to pursue the heirs who received the assets, up to the value of what each of them took, which converts a tidy estate debt into a personal claim landing on a Canadian address years after everyone thought the file was closed. The forum is the Regional Labour Court, not the Family Court, and the defendant is the estate or its administrator; where the family directed the work day to day the caregiver will often join the adult children as joint employers, which is precisely the exposure the heirs were trying to avoid. Claims run for seven years under the Prescription Law 5718-1958, so silence buys nothing. Practically, a Canadian heir cannot litigate this from a distance without an Israeli representative holding a notarially authenticated and apostilled power of attorney, and Canada's accession to the Apostille Convention on 11 January 2024 removed the old consular legalisation step for Ontario and British Columbia documents. Where the family is still deciding how to handle care rather than winding it up, our answer on arranging a live-in caregiver for a parent in Israel from abroad sets out how the employment is meant to be papered from the start.

In Practice: Section 4 of the Severance Pay Law 5723-1963 entitles a caregiver whose work ended on the employer's death to severance as though dismissed, once one year of service is complete under Section 1. At the NIS 6,443 monthly minimum wage in force from April 2026, six years produces about NIS 38,658 before pension arrears and leave redemption. The claim is heard by the Regional Labour Court and ranks as an estate debt under Section 126 of the Succession Law 5725-1965, with a three-month window to lodge against an administrator under Section 123(a) and a seven-year limitation period overall.

When to Consult a Lawyer

• You are close to distributing the estate. Once the money leaves the estate account, Section 128 lets the caregiver pursue each heir personally up to the value received, and recovering a share already wired to Canada is far harder than holding a reserve back now.
• The family directed the caregiver's hours, holidays or duties after the parent lost capacity. That is the factual foundation for naming the adult children as joint employers, and how the correspondence is answered in the first weeks shapes whether that argument gets traction.
• No pension fund was ever opened and no written employment terms exist. Absent records, the Labour Court will work from the caregiver's account of the dates and the wage, and reconstructing the true service period from bank transfers and permit records is a job to start before a statement of claim is filed, not after.

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Speak With an Israeli Attorney

We quantify what the estate genuinely owes, separate it from what is being claimed, defend the joint-employer allegation against the heirs, and structure the reserve so the estate can be distributed without leaving anyone personally exposed.

Contact us for a confidential initial consultation.