Can I ship my late father's antiquities collection from Israel to the United States?

Sort the collection before you sort the shipping, because Israeli law draws its line by date of manufacture. Section 1 of the Antiquities Law 5738-1978 defines an antiquity as an object made by man before the year 1700, which means the Roman oil lamps and the Hasmonean coins are regulated and the 1890 Galician silver Torah crown is not. For the regulated pieces, Section 22 prohibits removal from Israel without written approval: the Director of the Israel Antiquities Authority for ordinary antiquities, and the Minister where the piece is one of national value. Section 2 is the provision that ends more of these files than any other. Antiquities found in Israel after the law came into force in 1978 belong to the State, so an undocumented recent find in a display cabinet was never your father's to leave you.

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Detailed Answer

Provenance therefore does most of the work. A collection assembled before 1978, or bought from a dealer licensed under Section 15, can lawfully be privately owned and can be considered for an export permit. Receipts, old insurance schedules, auction catalogues and dealer certificates are what the Israel Antiquities Authority looks for, and its Theft Prevention Unit takes an unsentimental view of a family story unsupported by paper. Expect the Authority to inspect the pieces physically, to photograph and register them, and to refuse export for anything it classifies as having national value even where private ownership is not in dispute. Penalties under Section 37 include imprisonment, and this is not a theoretical risk at Ben Gurion, where undeclared antiquities in checked baggage are seized routinely. Shipping first and applying afterwards is the single worst approach available.

Two other layers apply because you live abroad. The collection is estate property before it is your property, so an Israeli succession order or probate order has to issue before anything can be released, permitted or sold, and heirs abroad usually run that in parallel with the Antiquities Authority file rather than after it, since both take months. If several heirs are entitled, the Authority will want to know who is applying and on what basis, and a written agreement among the heirs prevents the application stalling. The application itself can be run by an Israeli lawyer under an apostilled power of attorney without anyone flying in, though the pieces must be physically available for inspection in Israel. On the American side, the shipment is declared to Customs and Border Protection on import with the Israeli permit attached, and any future sale through a US auction house will trigger its own provenance review, since major houses apply pre-1970 provenance standards that are stricter than Israeli law requires. The rest of the estate follows the ordinary route for registering and transferring inherited Israeli assets to US heirs.

In Practice: Section 22 of the Antiquities Law 5738-1978 requires the written approval of the Director of the Israel Antiquities Authority before an antiquity leaves the country, and applications are handled by the Authority in Jerusalem with physical inspection of the items, typically taking 4 to 8 weeks where provenance documents are complete and considerably longer where they are not. Section 37 backs it with criminal penalties running to imprisonment. On a collection appraised at around NIS 120,000, budget NIS 8,000 to NIS 20,000 for an Israeli appraiser, the permit application and the estate paperwork, and remember that the succession order from the Inheritance Registrar costs NIS 520 plus NIS 130 for publication and takes 3 to 6 months on its own.

When to Consult a Lawyer

• Part of the collection has no provenance documents, where the correct sequence is a legal assessment before any approach to the Authority, since an application can itself trigger a seizure.
• The Authority classifies a piece as being of national value and refuses export, which turns the matter into an administrative challenge rather than a shipping problem.
• Heirs disagree about whether to sell in Israel or export, where a sale through a Section 15 licensed dealer inside Israel may be both faster and more valuable than a permitted export.

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Speak With an Israeli Attorney

An Israeli lawyer can assess which items are actually regulated, assemble the provenance file, and run the succession order and the export permit application together so the collection is not stranded between two authorities.

Contact us for a confidential initial consultation.