The Family Court in Petah Tikva recently accepted a lawsuit by two brothers seeking to dissolve joint ownership of their late parents’ farm in a moshav, where their sister has lived for more than 40 years. Judge Idit Ben-Dov Julian rejected the sister’s claim that an informal family deal from the 1980s gave her the property, and ruled that the farm must be sold to the highest bidder.
The family had nine children. Their father died in 1977 and their mother in 1984. A few months before the mother’s death, the daughter moved into the agricultural plot and has lived there ever since. But since 2018, a series of rulings had already weakened her position, finding that the land was part of the estate and had to be divided among the seven siblings under the inheritance order issued after the mother’s death.
In August 2020, two siblings filed for partition, asking the court to sell the farm to a third party and divide the proceeds among all the heirs. The daughter countered that all the children had agreed in the 1980s that she would receive the farm in return for paying each sibling $5,000.
Judge Ben-Dov Julian found that even if talks had once taken place, they never became a binding agreement. She said the daughter did not prove she actually paid the money, except to one sister, and found her account not credible. The testimony of her brother, one of the plaintiffs, also undercut her version, as did a 2012 protocol in which she said she hoped to reach an arrangement with the other heirs soon. The court ordered the farm sold and the proceeds split equally among the siblings, with the daughter receiving 2/7 for her deceased sister’s share. She was also ordered to pay NIS 140,000 in legal costs and attorneys’ fees.
