“We received recommendations about you from several people,” she said on the phone when she asked to schedule a meeting. “Our father passed away and left us a building. We need someone to accompany us through the process. We don't know the language and we also don't have the knowledge or the ability to deal with this in a foreign country,” she continued.
We set a date for a meeting and I asked her to come with all the documents they have on the property and with the probate order.
The two sisters who sat across from me told me about their father, the death of their mother at a relatively young age, the father's second marriage and the estrangement that followed, stemming from his second wife, but also told of the reconciliation at a later stage and how they cared for him in his final years. The father left a will in which he divided his property between his second wife and his daughters. The will was approved by the court, and the daughters have not been in contact with his second wife since his death.
The inheritance law in the country where the building he left to his daughters is located differs from Israeli law, and the approval procedures differ as well. The team at the local office offered various suggestions on how to implement the will, but the suggestions that involved disregarding the will and conducting an inheritance proceeding in that country would have produced a result in which the second wife too would have won a share of the building (contrary to the father's wishes and to what the will states), or alternatively would have required bringing relatives as witnesses who knew the deceased (who was 90 when he died).
For several weeks I held countless conversations with the local team, and we consulted additional local lawyers and local notaries. The daughters in Israel began to lose patience, and could not understand how a simple procedure like carrying out a will was becoming more and more complicated.
In the meantime the building stands closed and locked up.
Two months had passed since we began handling the matter for the daughters and there was no light at the end of the tunnel. I prepared a legal document as an opinion surveying Israeli law regarding wills and inheritance, including its implications and approval procedures, and through the local office we began circulating it among notaries. After quite a few checks and soundings (and another two months that passed), the gut feeling and the hopes were realized and we managed to locate a local notary who agreed to ratify the will on the basis of the opinion I wrote. What a relief.
Stories are based on real situations, with identifying details changed. Not legal advice.
Translated from the Hebrew original. עברית