Israel extends period to locate potential heirs for unclaimed assets

The State of Israel last week delayed the transfer of unclaimed assets, valued at hundreds of millions of shekels, to state ownership.

At the end of 2023, the Unclaimed Assets Management Unit in the Justice Ministry’s Guardian General put out two statements that indicated that it intended to ask the courts to transfer 125 real estate and monetary assets to state ownership.

Unclaimed assets are managed by the state when it cannot locate the legal owners or heirs. After 15 years, the Guardian General allows 30 days for potential heirs to petition for their right to the assets.

The period was extended to 90 days on January 24, but recent moves made by the Unclaimed Assets Management Unit raised the concern that it was not doing enough to locate the rightful owners.

Almost all the names in the latest list were published in Hebrew, and details on the original owners’ countries of birth were not included, making it more difficult for potential heirs to know whether they could be entitled to the assets. Furthermore, the lists were not published in Jewish communities abroad, meaning heirs not residing in Israel could not know if they may be the rightful owners.

Most announcements of this nature are meant to be made in Jewish communities in North America, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and the UK, where many potential heirs are located.

The Guardian General claimed that the names were published in Hebrew per court order and that the rest of the details were concealed as they are generally used to verify the entitlement of potential owners.

However, this claim contradicts the way the Guardian General usually functions.

The Unit for Management of Unclaimed Assets also published a separate list of assets belonging to Holocaust victims, and the names on this list were all written in the Latin alphabet with details on the original owner’s country of origin. These details are also included in the Jewish Colonial Trust shareholders’ database.

A State Comptroller report from a few years ago declared that the Guardian General and the Foreign Ministry must jointly work on locating potential legal owners living abroad so as not to harm private property rights and that they can only ask the courts to transfer the assets to the state after conducting a thorough investigation. They would then have to convince the court that they had exhausted every possibility.

The Guardian General also stated that even if unclaimed assets were transferred to the state, anyone who could prove they were entitled to ownership could be refunded the assets’ value with no statute of limitation.

“The Guardian General regularly publishes the names of owners on its website with an indication of whether they are real estate or monetary assets, and anyone can contact us to inquire whether they may be entitled to ownership,” it told Zman Yisrael, The Times of Israel’s sister Hebrew site.

“After the management period defined in the law expires, the Guardian General carries out a comprehensive investigative process to locate potential owners of the assets, and we only contact the court for approval to transfer the assets to the state if they are not found.”

The Guardian General added that it fails to locate potential owners in only 20% of unclaimed asset cases.