Will an American certified translation be accepted by Israeli authorities?

Families spend real money on this twice. A New York agency produces a beautifully bound Hebrew translation with an ATA seal, a notarised certificate of accuracy and a state apostille, the bundle flies to Israel, and the clerk at the Inheritance Registrar hands it back. Nothing was done wrong in New York. The document simply does not answer the question Israeli law asks.

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Detailed Answer

Section 15 of the Notaries Law 5736-1976 sets a personal competence test rather than a documentary one: a notary may not certify the correctness of a translation unless he is fluent in both the source and target languages and either made the translation himself or checked it. There is no Israeli register of sworn translators and no mechanism for recognising a foreign one, so an American translator's credential has nowhere to attach. What the United States produces instead is a certificate of translation accuracy signed by the translator, sworn or acknowledged before a notary public, and then apostilled. The apostille is where the misunderstanding lives. A US apostille is issued at state level by the Secretary of State and authenticates the notary's signature and seal, nothing more. It certifies that a notary in Ohio is genuinely a notary in Ohio. It says nothing whatever about whether the Hebrew is right, which is precisely the point Section 15 goes to.

For an American family this is less painful than it sounds, because Hebrew and English are the one pair Israeli notaries handle in volume. Almost any notary in Tel Aviv or Jerusalem can certify an English to Hebrew translation directly, so the sensible order is to apostille the original US document in its home state, courier it to Israel, and have the translation and the notarial certificate produced there. Doing it the other way round means paying for a translation twice. Where the notary does not master the language, the fallback is a notarial certification of the translator's declaration, which costs around NIS 200, but the certificate states on its face that the notary is not certifying accuracy, and the Inheritance Registrar, the Land Registry (Tabu) and the Population and Immigration Authority routinely reject it. Banks and insurers are more flexible than registries, and an Israeli court will take a translation supported by a translator's affidavit, so the practical question is always which body is going to read the document. Note too that documents from different states go to different Secretary of State offices, which matters where a death certificate is from Florida and letters testamentary are from New Jersey. Our guide to using US documents in Israel sets out the full apostille sequence for each document type.

In Practice: Under the Notaries Regulations (Service Fees) 1978, updated each 1 January, an Israeli notarial translation costs NIS 251 for the first 100 words, NIS 197 for each additional 100 up to 1,000, and NIS 99 per 100 beyond that, so a two-page US will runs roughly NIS 1,200 to NIS 1,800. The Notaries Department at the Ministry of Justice supervises the certificate, and most Tel Aviv notaries turn an English to Hebrew translation round in three to five business days. Budget a further two to three weeks for the underlying US state apostille and international courier before anything can be filed with the Inheritance Registrar.

When to Consult a Lawyer

• The document is a will or a court order that will be filed under Section 66 of the Succession Law 1965. A rejected translation does not just cost the fee again, it resets the Registrar's queue and adds four to eight weeks to a file that already runs three to six months.
• Names do not match across the bundle. A Hebrew birth name against an anglicised passport name is the single most common reason Israeli registries refuse an otherwise perfect translation, and it is fixed by a notarised identity declaration, not by retranslating.
• The translation was produced abroad by a relative or a bilingual friend. Israeli registries treat that as no certification at all, and using it in a filing can raise questions about the accuracy of the whole application rather than just that page.

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Speak With an Israeli Attorney

We tell you which Israeli body will read each document, arrange the notarial translation that body actually accepts, and stop you paying twice for a US bundle that was never going to clear.

Contact us for a confidential initial consultation.