Bituach Leumi After a Death When the Widow or the Children Live in America: The Survivors' Pension Follows a Survivor to the United States Only If It Was Being Paid Before She Left, the Death Grant Stops at the Spouse and Minor Children, and the Tax Treaty Exempts the Pension in Both Countries

This is orientation, not legal or tax advice. It maps what exists and the questions to take to a licensed professional. It does not tell you what to do about your own estate or taxes.

A father dies in Netanya in February 2026, at 78. He drew a Bituach Leumi old-age pension for years; his wife, 74, lived with him in the apartment they bought in 1981. Their daughter lives in Teaneck, New Jersey, and by the end of the shiva the plan is set: her mother will fly to America in April, stay through the summer, and very likely not come back to live. The Israeli son, who handles the paperwork, assumes that Bituach Leumi will sort itself out.

In a second family the order is reversed. The mother has lived in Maryland near her children since 2019. Her husband stayed in Haifa, where his doctors and his synagogue were, and flew over twice a year. When he dies in Haifa, she asks the obvious question: is she entitled to what an Israeli widow gets?

Both families are asking about the same two payments. Bituach Leumi, the National Insurance Institute, pays a monthly survivors' pension, kitzvat she'erim, and a one-time death grant, maanak ptira. The first family can very likely keep the pension in New Jersey, provided things happen in the right order. The second family runs into a sentence that the Institute publishes on its own website, and that sentence decides most of this page.

Two payments that never enter the estate

The survivors' pension and the death grant are benefits under the National Insurance Law. They are paid by law to the people the law defines as survivors. They are not assets of the person who died, so they do not appear in the inventory, the will cannot direct them, and the succession order does not divide them. A widow who receives nothing under her husband's will can still be the only person Bituach Leumi pays. An adult son named as sole heir receives none of it.

That puts these payments in the same family as an Israeli life insurance payout to a named beneficiary: money that moves at a death without passing through the estate. It also means the heirs' paperwork and the survivors' paperwork are two separate files. The succession order the family is chasing does nothing for the pension claim, and the pension claim waits for nothing in the estate.

The survivors' pension is monthly. Kol Zchut, the Israeli government-supported rights site, lists who may receive it: the widow, the widower, and orphans, each as the National Insurance Law defines them. A widower with no orphan in his care faces an income test. The entitlement also depends on the person who died: he or she must have been insured for survivors' insurance, completed the qualifying period, and paid contributions on time. The Institute also pays a separate special survivors' benefit, gimlat she'erim meyuchedet, in some cases the ordinary pension does not cover, and its rules abroad are stricter: on a long stay outside Israel it stops from the month of departure.

The 2026 monthly amounts Kol Zchut quotes turn on the survivor's age and the number of children: NIS 1,381 for a widow or widower aged 40 to 50 with no children, NIS 1,838 from age 50, NIS 1,941 from age 80, NIS 2,700 with one child and NIS 3,562 with two. Each additional child adds NIS 862. On top of the base amount comes a seniority addition of 2 percent for every full year the deceased was insured, capped at 50 percent, which means a husband insured for 25 years or more lifts his widow's pension by half. A widow or widower who remarries, or lives with a new partner as a recognized couple, generally loses the pension, with limited exceptions.

The death grant is a single payment of NIS 10,514, the figure in force since January 1, 2026. The Institute pays it to the spouse of a person who, until death, was receiving one of seven benefits: old-age, income support, general disability, special services, work injury, survivors', or the Prisoners of Zion benefit. If there is no spouse, it goes to a child who meets the National Insurance definition of a child, which in practice means under 18, or under 24 while in regular army or national service, with a few related cases. An adult American son or daughter with a career and a mortgage does not meet that definition. When both parents are gone, the grant does not pass to the grown children at all, except in a narrow case the Institute describes where the second spouse dies within 100 days of the first, the first left no child within the definition, and the grant is then paid to whoever carried most of the cost of the headstone.

The grant is usually paid automatically. When it is not, Form 416 claims it, and a survivors' pension claim on Form 410 includes the death grant, so a widow who files for the pension does not file twice.

The American sentence

The Institute's page on survivors staying abroad sets out three regimes.

A survivor who travels abroad keeps receiving the pension for up to three months, paid into an Israeli bank account. Anyone planning a longer stay must tell the old-age and survivors department at the branch that handles the file, by an online form, an inquiry through the website, or the manual Form T418. In special conditions, the page says, payment continues beyond that.

A survivor who lives in a country with a social security convention with Israel may receive the pension there even if the person who died was not an Israeli resident at death. The Institute's old-age pages use Britain and France as examples of convention countries.

The United States is not a convention country. For survivors there, the Institute publishes a separate rule, and it is short. Survivors living in the United States may receive the pension there only if the deceased was an Israeli resident at the time of death, and they received the survivors' pension lawfully before they left for the United States.

The American exception does not come from a social security agreement; there is no US-Israel totalization agreement to fall back on. Kol Zchut traces the parallel old-age rule, under which a pension already being paid in Israel continues when the recipient moves to America, to the treaty of friendship, commerce and navigation between the two countries.

Read against the two families, the sentence works like this.

In Netanya, both conditions can be met. The father was an Israeli resident when he died. If the mother claims the pension while she still lives in Israel, is approved, and begins receiving it, and only then moves to New Jersey, she is a survivor who received the pension lawfully before leaving for the United States. She notifies the branch of the long stay, and the question becomes administrative. If she flies in April with the claim still unfiled, planning to "deal with it from America," the second condition is exposed. The order of events is the whole case.

In Maryland, the first condition may be met, since the husband lived in Haifa, but the second is the problem. The widow was not receiving a pension before she left for the United States; she left years earlier, when there was no pension to receive. On the Institute's wording, she is not the survivor the American rule describes. Two things could change the analysis, and both need to be put to the Institute in writing rather than assumed: whether she was still an Israeli resident herself, with her center of life in Israel, despite the time in Maryland; and whether the "special conditions" language gives the branch any discretion in her case. A family in her position should get a written decision and, if it is a refusal, appeal it on the record. The page does not promise a result either way.

The third arrangement is the one where the father himself had moved to the United States years before. He was not an Israeli resident at death, the first condition fails, and the convention-country exception that would rescue a survivor in London does not exist for one in Chicago.

The claim clock, and why it matters more here

Kol Zchut sets the deadline: the survivors' pension claim should be filed within 12 months of the death. A later claim is paid retroactively for no more than 12 months, so a late claim costs money month by month, and for a widow planning a move it costs more. Every month the claim waits in Israel is a month the move waits, or a month the second American condition sits unmet.

Payment arrives on the 28th of each month. When the deceased was already receiving an old-age or disability pension, the survivors' pension starts on the first of the month after the death. A survivor abroad for more than three months at a time must also send, once a year, a life certificate signed by a consulate, a recognized notary, a local authority or a social institution in the country where she lives. Kol Zchut notes that the Institute needs the original document; a fax will not do.

The Institute's pages do not say whether a survivor living in the United States is paid into an American account or must keep an Israeli one. That is a question for the branch at the time of the move. If the answer is an Israeli account in the widow's name, that account belongs on the FBAR and possibly Form 8938 once its balance crosses the thresholds.

An orphan in America

The survivors' pension for a child is normally paid to the parent the child lives with. Kol Zchut lists the exceptions, and the first one matters for this site's readers: when the child's parent is not in Israel, the child's pension is paid to a guardian appointed for the child. In an Israeli-American family where the surviving parent and the children are in the United States, the orphan's entitlement does not simply flow to the parent's hand. It runs through a guardianship, which in Israel is a Family Court appointment, the same mechanism described on the minor-heir page for money a child inherits.

Whether an orphan who lives in the United States can receive the pension at all is governed by the same American sentence as the widow's case. A child who was receiving it in Israel and then moved with the surviving parent is in the Netanya position. A child who has always lived in America is in the Maryland one.

The tax: one article of the treaty does the work

For most foreign income, an American citizen gets little from the US-Israel income tax treaty. Article 6(3), the saving clause, lets the United States tax its citizens and residents as if the treaty did not exist, and the double tax is cured, if at all, through foreign tax credits.

Social security is the exception. Article 21 of the treaty reads, in full: social security payments and other public pensions paid by one of the Contracting States to an individual who is a resident of the other Contracting State shall be exempt from tax in both Contracting States, except for payments for government service covered by Article 22. And Article 6(4)(a), as amended by the 1980 Protocol, lists Article 21 among the benefits the saving clause does not touch.

For the widow in New Jersey, three pieces line up. A Bituach Leumi survivors' pension is a social security payment made by Israel. She is a resident of the United States; if she is a US citizen, Article 3(1)(c), added by the 1993 Protocol, treats her as a US resident for the treaty when she has a substantial presence, a permanent home or a habitual abode there, which a woman living with her daughter in Teaneck has. So the pension is exempt from US federal income tax and from Israeli income tax, whether she holds an American passport or not.

The disclosure question has a clean answer too. A treaty position normally goes on Form 8833, but the Form 8833 instructions, following Regulations section 301.6114-1(c), waive reporting for a position that a treaty reduces or modifies the tax on social security and other public pensions.

Three limits belong next to that answer.

The treaty binds federal income tax. Whether New Jersey, New York, California or any other state follows it is a state question, and some states do not follow federal treaties. The widow's preparer should check her state.

The death grant is a one-time payment, not a pension, and nothing on the Institute's pages or in the treaty text addresses it directly. Whether a US preparer treats it as a social security payment under Article 21 is a judgment for that preparer. For a widow who received it while still living in Israel, the question may not arise at all.

And a survivors' annuity from the husband's Israeli pension fund, his keren pensia, is not Bituach Leumi. Article 20(4) of the treaty defines private pensions as periodic payments by reason of retirement or death other than the social security payments Article 21 covers. That money is taxed under the private-pension article, with a different result, and the pension page walks through it. Families often receive both in the same month, from two Israeli payers, with two different American answers.

One structural note: Article 32(2) lets either country end the social security exemption on notice at any time, separately from the rest of the treaty. Nothing in the IRS's published text of the treaty shows that either country has done so. It is the reason to check the article is still in force before relying on it in a given year.

What to do this month

The first question is where the survivor lives today, and the answer decides the order.

If the widow is still in Israel, the claim goes in before the flight. Form 410, filed at the branch or through the Institute's online document service, with the documents the form asks for. She waits for the approval letter and the first payment, then notifies the branch of the long stay with Form T418 and asks two questions in writing: which account the pension will be paid into once she lives in the United States, and where the yearly life certificate should be sent. Only then does the one-way ticket make sense.

If the widow already lives in the United States, she files anyway, inside the 12 months, and states the facts plainly: where the deceased lived, where she lived, and for how long in each place. A written refusal is appealable; a claim never filed is not. The family keeps records of her own ties to Israel, since her residency is part of the question.

If there are minor children, the family finds out whether the children's pension will require a guardian because the parent is not in Israel, and starts the Family Court step early, since it takes months.

On the American side, the family tells the preparer three things: the pension is a Bituach Leumi social security payment; Article 21 of the treaty, protected from the saving clause by Article 6(4)(a), is the basis for excluding it; and the state return needs its own look. If a private pension fund is also paying, the preparer needs to see that it is a different payer under a different article.

A year that opens with a death is a year in which everything else has to be rebuilt: where to live, whose house to sleep in, which country's calendar to keep. The law here does not ask much of a widow, but it asks for one thing in the right place: the claim first, the move second. Filed in that order, the pension goes with her.