Quick Answer: Depositing a will in Israel with the Registrar of Inheritance Affairs is optional, and for most people it is free. It buys you one narrow but real advantage: under Section 21 of the Inheritance Law 5725-1965, a will that stays in deposit until you die becomes prima facie evidence that you made it and that it existed no later than the day you deposited it. What deposit does not do is make a defective will valid, shorten probate, or stop anyone from contesting it.

Most of the questions I get about depositing a will start from a misunderstanding. People assume that the Israeli state keeps a register of wills the way it keeps a register of land, and that a will which is not on that register somehow counts for less. It does not work that way. Israel has no compulsory will register. Your will is valid from the moment you sign it correctly, and thousands of Israeli estates are settled every year on the strength of a will that spent twenty years in a desk drawer.

So why bother? Because the drawer is the problem. A will only works if it is found, and if the version that is found is the one you actually signed. Deposit answers both of those risks, and it answers a third that matters more than people expect: it fixes a date. For anyone with Israeli assets who lives abroad, though, there is a catch in the procedure that is easy to miss until you are standing at the counter, and it has nothing to do with the will itself.

1. Overview: what deposit is, and what it is not

Depositing a will (hafkadat tzava'a, ื”ืคืงื“ืช ืฆื•ื•ืื”) means handing the original signed document to the Registrar of Inheritance Affairs (ha-rasham le-inyanei yerusha), an office of the Ministry of Justice that sits under the Administrator General (ha-apotropos ha-klali). The Registrar scans a copy, seals the original in an envelope, and puts it in a safe. Nobody, including your family, can see it or confirm it exists while you are alive.

The single most common misconception is that deposit is a form of official approval. It is not. The clerk who takes your will does not read it for legal soundness, does not check whether your witnesses were properly independent, and does not verify that you had testamentary capacity. If you deposit a will that leaves everything to a beneficiary who also served as one of your two witnesses, the Registrar will accept it into the safe, and that gift is void anyway under Section 35 of the Inheritance Law, which strikes down any provision benefiting a person who drafted the will, witnessed it, or otherwise took part in making it. Deposit is custody, plus a date stamp. Nothing more.

It is worth being clear about what deposit does not buy you, because the marketing around this service oversells it:

  • It does not make an invalid will valid.
  • It does not prevent a contest. Any person with an interest can still file an objection to probate on grounds of capacity, undue influence, or defective execution.
  • It does not speed up probate. A deposited will goes through exactly the same application to the Registrar as one produced from a shoebox.
  • It does not revoke your earlier wills. Only a later will, or an express act of revocation, does that.
  • It does not tell your family anything. They will not know the will exists until after you die.
In Practice โ€” What actually happens at the Registrar's counter: The whole appointment takes about twenty minutes. You attend one of the Registrar's public reception offices (the main branches are in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Haifa, Be'er Sheva and Nazareth, with a smaller branch serving the Rishon LeZion area open Sundays and Wednesdays, 8:30 to 12:30). You complete a short deposit application form by hand at the counter and produce the original signed will plus photo identification. The clerk checks that the photo on your ID is current; if your teudat zehut photo is decades old, bring a passport or driving licence as well, because a stale photo is a real reason they turn people away. The will is then scanned into the Registrar's system, sealed into an envelope in front of you, and stored in the safe. You leave with a deposit confirmation. Keep it: it is the document your family will use to tell the Registrar there is something in the safe.

2. What deposit actually achieves under Section 21

Section 21 of the Inheritance Law 5725-1965 is short, and the second half of it is the whole reason the service exists. A will that was deposited and remained in deposit until the testator's death is prima facie evidence (ra'aya lechaora) of two facts: that the person named in it as testator made the will, and that the will was made no later than the date of deposit.

Those two facts sound modest. In a contested estate they are not. Consider what an objector normally has to work with. The classic attack on a home-made Israeli will is that the signature is not really the deceased's, or that the document was produced after the death by whoever stood to gain from it, or that it was signed years later than it claims when the testator was no longer lucid. Each of those arguments requires the objector to prove a negative about a document nobody watched being signed.

Deposit takes two of those arguments away at the start. The burden shifts. Instead of the beneficiaries proving the will is genuine, the objector must bring evidence to displace a statutory presumption that it is. The date point does quiet work here too: if your will is in the Registrar's safe from March 2019, nobody can seriously argue it was written in 2024 when you were unwell, because the state was holding it five years earlier.

In Practice โ€” What the Section 21 presumption is worth in a real dispute: The presumption is rebuttable, and it is narrower than clients hope. It goes to authorship and date. It says nothing about whether you had capacity on the day you signed, and capacity is the ground on which most Israeli will contests are actually fought. I have seen a deposited will set aside because the testator was in the early stages of dementia when he deposited it, and the Registrar's clerk had no reason or authority to notice. Where deposit earns its keep is the forgery and the back-dating case. Where it will not save you is the capacity case, and for that the answer is a contemporaneous medical opinion on the day of signing, kept with the file. A contested probate moves from the Registrar to the Family Court under Section 67A and typically runs 12 to 36 months. Anything that removes one live issue from that hearing is worth twenty minutes at a counter.

3. Which wills can be deposited, and which cannot

Israeli law recognises four forms of will, and they do not all interact with the deposit system the same way. Section 18 lists them, and the following sections set out what each requires:

  • Handwritten will (Section 19). Written entirely in the testator's own hand, dated, and signed by them. No witnesses. This form can be deposited, and it is the form that benefits most from deposit, because a handwritten will has no witnesses to confirm anything after you are gone.
  • Will before witnesses (Section 20). In writing, dated, signed by the testator in front of two witnesses after declaring to them that this is their will, with both witnesses then signing. This is the standard Israeli will and it can be deposited.
  • Will before an authority (Section 22). Made orally before, or submitted in writing to, a judge, a Registrar of Inheritance Affairs, a member of a rabbinical court, or a notary. In practice this usually means a notarial will.
  • Oral will (Section 23). The shechiv mera or deathbed will, spoken before two witnesses by someone gravely ill or facing imminent death. The witnesses must record a memorandum of the words, the date, and the circumstances, and lodge it with the Registrar. This is not deposit in the Section 21 sense and it is not something a person plans for.

The text of Section 21 speaks of wills made in handwriting or before witnesses. In practice the Registrar also accepts wills executed before a notary for deposit, and there is a specific channel for them, which I come back to below because it is the route that solves the problem for people living outside Israel.

Mutual wills between spouses, made under Section 8A, are treated as two separate documents for this purpose. Two testators, two deposit applications, two fee calculations. Depositing them together on the same visit does not merge them into one filing. If you and your spouse are signing linked wills, see our guide to mutual wills in Israel for how the restriction on revocation operates, because that restriction, and not the deposit, is what actually binds the survivor.

Advertisement

4. The deposit procedure step by step

There are two routes. Which one is open to you depends almost entirely on whether you hold an Israeli identity number.

In person at a Registrar office. You attend personally with the original will and current photo ID, fill in the deposit application at the counter, pay the fee if one is due, and hand over the document. The will is scanned, sealed, and filed. This route is open to anyone, Israeli or not, who can physically get to a Registrar office.

Online through the government portal. The Ministry of Justice operates an online deposit channel through the government personal area at my.gov.il. It is built for two categories of user: a testator with an Israeli teudat zehut depositing their own will, and a notary depositing a will that was executed before them, within 30 days of execution. You register on the portal, pay any fee through the government payment service, and then deliver the original will to a Registrar office within 45 days. The online step does not eliminate the paper original. It reserves your place and handles the payment; the physical document still has to reach the safe.

That 45 day window matters. An online submission that is never followed by the original will does not result in a deposited will, and it does not create the Section 21 presumption. It creates a lapsed application and a receipt.

What you need to bring, in every case:

  • The original signed will. Not a copy, not a scan, not a certified duplicate.
  • Photo identification with a current photograph. An Israeli ID card with an out-of-date photo needs to be backed by a passport or driving licence.
  • The fee, if one applies to you (see section 6).

One point that surprises people: you hand over the original and you do not keep a stamped copy of equal standing. Make your own photocopy before you go, and tell your Israeli attorney and your executor where the deposit confirmation is filed. A deposited will that nobody knows about is only marginally better than a lost one, because the Registrar has no way to connect a death in Toronto to an envelope in a safe in Jerusalem unless somebody tells it.

5. The personal appearance rule and why it traps foreign testators

Section 21 requires that the deposit be made by delivery of the will by the testator personally. The Registrar reads that literally, and this is the single provision that causes the most trouble for the readers of this site.

You cannot deposit a will through a power of attorney. Not through your Israeli lawyer holding a notarised and apostilled POA drafted for exactly this purpose. Not through your spouse. Not through your adult child who lives in Ra'anana and offered to take care of it on their next errand. The Registrar will decline all of them. The rule runs in both directions: only you can put the will in, and only you can take it out.

This is a deliberate safeguard rather than bureaucratic obstinacy. The whole evidential value of Section 21 rests on the Registrar having seen the testator, checked their photograph, and watched them hand over the document. An agent-deposited will would prove nothing about who made it, and the presumption would be worthless.

The practical consequence for a non-resident is awkward. The in-person route needs you in Israel. The online route is built around an Israeli ID number, which a foreign national who has never made Aliyah does not have. So for a British or American testator with a Netanya apartment and no Israeli identity card, the deposit system as normally described is effectively shut.

In Practice โ€” The route that works for testators who live abroad: Sign the will before an Israeli notary as a will before an authority under Section 22, and let the notary deposit it. The notary channel is the recognised exception to the personal delivery rule, and the notary can file it online within 30 days of execution. This gets you two things at once. A Section 22 notarial will already carries strong evidential weight on its own, because a public officer witnessed the signing and recorded it, so you are less dependent on the Section 21 presumption in the first place. And the deposit then happens without you needing a second trip. The timing point people miss: the 30 day window runs from execution, so if you sign in Jerusalem on the last day of a visit and the notary is slow, the online channel closes and the will has to be walked in. Fix the deposit date with the notary before you sign, not after. Israeli notaries are senior attorneys licensed by the Ministry of Justice, and notarial fees are set by regulation rather than negotiated, so the cost is predictable. If you are weighing whether to make a separate Israeli will at all, our guide on Israeli wills for foreign property owners works through that decision.

If none of that is practical, do not over-worry the point. A will validly made in London or New York is not invalidated by never being deposited in Israel. It will need to be probated in Israel to reach Israeli assets, with an apostille and a certified translation, and that is a separate process covered in our guide to foreign wills under Israeli law. Deposit is a convenience and an evidential upgrade. It was never a gateway.

6. Fees and where to go

The fee structure is more generous than most people expect, and it is widely misreported. Depositing a will is exempt from the fee if it is your first deposit, and it is also exempt if five years or more have passed since your previous deposit. The fee, approximately NIS 126 at the 2026 rate, bites only when you deposit another will within five years of an earlier one.

In other words, the system charges you for churn. Deposit once and it costs nothing. Rewrite your will three times in eighteen months and re-deposit each version, and you pay for the second and third. Registrar fees are revised periodically and older articles still quote NIS 115, so check the current schedule on the Ministry of Justice site before you travel.

For context, these are the Registrar's other fees at the 2026 rates, because deposit is the cheap part of the process and the real costs land on your heirs:

  • Application for a succession order (tzav yerusha) or a probate order (tzav kiyum tzava'a): about NIS 507 filed online, or NIS 597 filed on paper. The online route carries a 15% discount.
  • Mandatory newspaper publication fee on any such application: about NIS 66.
  • So the realistic all-in filing cost for your executor is roughly NIS 573 online, or NIS 663 on paper, before any legal fees.
  • Heirs of fallen IDF soldiers and of victims of hostile acts recognised by the National Insurance Institute are exempt from the application fee on production of confirmation from the Ministry of Defense or the NII.

There is no seniority discount and no disability discount on these fees. The 15% online saving is the only general reduction available. For a fuller breakdown of what an Israeli estate costs to administer, including attorney fees, see our guide to Israeli estate administration costs.

7. Withdrawing, replacing, or revoking a deposited will

You can take your will back whenever you like. You submit a written request, attend in person, prove your identity, and sign for the envelope. As with deposit, no agent can do this for you.

Here is the point that trips people up, and it is worth being precise about it. Withdrawing a will from deposit does not revoke it. The document you walk out with is still your valid will. If you take it home and put it in a drawer and die that evening, it governs your estate, minus the Section 21 presumption you just surrendered. Revocation is a separate legal act. Under Section 36 you revoke a will by making a new one, by expressly revoking it in the manner required for making a will, or by destroying it. Retrieving an envelope from a safe is none of those things.

I have had this conversation more than once with a client who assumed that pulling the will out of deposit had wiped the slate clean, and who then died with a will they believed they had cancelled. If your intention is to cancel, cancel it properly and document that you did. Our guide to revoking or changing an Israeli will sets out the mechanics.

If you are replacing rather than cancelling, the sequence I would suggest is straightforward. Sign the new will first. Deposit the new will. Then, and only then, deal with the old one. Doing it in that order means there is never a window in which you have no valid will in existence, which is the exposure people create for themselves when they revoke on Monday and sign the replacement three weeks later, after the estate planning meeting they never got to.

You do not have to withdraw an old deposited will when you deposit a new one. Two wills can sit in the safe at once. The later one prevails to the extent of any inconsistency under Section 36, and the Registrar makes no attempt to reconcile them. That is a job for whoever probates the estate, and leaving them a puzzle is not a kindness. If the old will is genuinely superseded, retrieve and destroy it.

8. What happens after death, and the Section 75 duty

The Registrar does not learn that you have died. There is no automatic feed from the Population Authority to the inheritance safe, and this is the practical reason your deposit confirmation needs to be somewhere your family will look. Someone has to tell the Registrar.

Once the Registrar is on notice of the death, the file opens. If no application concerning the will has been filed within three months from the date of death, the Registrar opens the sealed envelope and notifies the people named in it as beneficiaries. That notification is often the first time a beneficiary learns they were named at all.

Opening the will changes nothing about who owns what. It is an administrative act that converts a sealed envelope into a document on a file. Israeli banks will not release a shekel, and the Land Registry (Tabu) will not move a title, on the strength of a will alone. Your beneficiaries still have to apply to the Registrar for a probate order, and only that order has operative effect. An uncontested probate application typically takes 3 to 6 months from filing; where there is no will and a succession order is needed instead, reckon on 4 to 8 months. Our stage-by-stage probate timeline breaks down where the months actually go.

In Practice โ€” The Section 75 duty, and why it applies to your family too: Section 75 of the Inheritance Law puts a positive legal duty on anyone holding a will to deliver it to the Registrar of Inheritance Affairs as soon as they learn the testator has died. Not eventually. Not once the family has had a chance to discuss it. The duty falls on whoever physically has the document: a spouse, a child, a friend, the drafting attorney, or a bank holding it in a safe deposit box. Sitting on a will because you dislike its contents is an offence, punishable by up to three months' imprisonment or a fine. Prosecutions under this provision are rare, and that is not the reason to comply. The reason is that a suppressed will surfaces eventually, usually in the worst possible way, and the person who sat on it has handed the other side a gift: a court that already believes they behaved badly. Two related points. Late delivery does not invalidate the will, so if a will turns up in a drawer eight months after a funeral, hand it in; the delay is not fatal to the document. And an authenticated copy satisfies the duty where the original cannot be found, though a copy raises its own evidential problems at probate.

One last consideration for families spread across time zones. The three month clock and the Registrar's notification run on Israeli process and Israeli addresses. If your beneficiaries are in Melbourne and Chicago and the Registrar's letter goes to an address you last used in 1998, the notification achieves nothing. Deposit solves the problem of the will being lost. It does not solve the problem of the beneficiaries being lost. Tell the people who need to know, in writing, where the confirmation is and which Israeli attorney holds the file.