An Enduring Power of Attorney for an Aging Parent in Israel: The Ordinary Power of Attorney Dies at the Moment You Need It, and Three American Filings Follow the Child Home

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 woman in Teaneck gets the call on a Tuesday. Her mother, eighty-four, has been in Ichilov for six days after a fall, and the social worker is asking who will sign for the rehabilitation placement and who is paying the caregiver. The daughter has an answer ready. Years ago, on a visit, her mother signed a general power of attorney in front of a notary in Tel Aviv so that the daughter could deal with the bank and the kupat cholim from abroad. She emails a scan to the branch.

The branch declines it. Not because the notarization is wrong, and not because the daughter is not who she says she is, but because the clerk asks the question Israeli institutions are trained to ask about an eighty-four-year-old principal: does she still understand what she signed? If the honest answer is no, the ordinary power of attorney has already ended, on its own, the moment that became true. Under section 14 of the Agency Law, 5725-1965, an agency terminates on the incapacity or death of the principal. The document the daughter has been relying on was built for a competent mother. It has no life after the diagnosis.

The instrument Israel created for exactly this moment is the enduring power of attorney, yipui koach mitmashech, which Amendment 18 to the Legal Capacity and Guardianship Law, 5722-1962, brought into force on April 11, 2017. It is the only Israeli document that is designed to begin working when the appointer stops understanding, rather than to stop working then. Since 2017, more than 260,000 of them have been deposited with the Administrator General, about 52,000 in 2024 alone, and roughly 78 percent of the people signing them are seventy or older. It has become the ordinary way an Israeli family plans for an ageing parent.

This page is for the family where the parent is in Israel and the child who will act for them is in the United States. It explains what the document is, why the American durable power of attorney in the drawer does not do the job, what the child abroad can and cannot do under it, and then the three American filing questions that arrive the day the document takes effect. The pages on an Israeli will and a US will and a mutual will for a US-Israel couple cover what happens at death. This page covers the years before it.

The document that dies at the moment you need it

Israeli practice has three ordinary powers of attorney and none of them survives incapacity. A general power of attorney, usually notarized, lets a lawyer or relative act for a living, competent principal, and is treated in practice as good for ten years. A special power of attorney covers one transaction. An irrevocable power of attorney, typically given to secure a real estate deal, is the exception that outlives the principal, and it is not a tool for managing a parent's life. Everything else falls under the Agency Law rule: when the principal can no longer form the intention the agent is supposed to carry out, the agency ends.

The American durable power of attorney is built on the opposite premise. Every US state lets a principal say, in the document itself, that the agent's authority continues through incapacity. Families reasonably assume a New York or Florida durable power will travel. In Israel it generally does not. Israeli practitioners who work across the two systems describe US durable powers and advance directives as not automatically recognized in Israel, and Israeli banks, the Land Registry and other Israeli institutions may refuse them unless a separate Israeli document exists. The reason is structural rather than bureaucratic. Israeli law channels every document about future incapacity through the Legal Capacity and Guardianship Law, with a dedicated online form, a certified lawyer, a deposit, and an activation procedure. A durable power signed in a Bergen County law office satisfies none of that, however well drafted it is for New Jersey.

What happens to a family that has no enduring power when the parent loses capacity is the older regime the 2017 reform was designed to make a last resort: a guardianship application to the Family Court, an appointed apotropos, ongoing reporting to the Administrator General, and court approval for the larger decisions. It can be done from abroad, through an Israeli lawyer, but it is slower, more expensive, more public, and it takes the choice of decision-maker away from the parent and gives it to a judge.

What an enduring power of attorney is

The document has three moving parts that a US family should keep separate: who makes it, who acts under it, and when it wakes up.

The appointer must be an adult, an Israeli resident, and someone who understands what the document means, what it is for, and what follows from it. That last requirement is the reason the document has to be done early. A parent in the first year of a dementia diagnosis may still qualify; a parent who no longer follows the explanation does not, and a certified lawyer who has doubts is entitled to require a specialist's opinion and attach it. The parent signs in person, in Israel, before the lawyer. A temporary wartime permit allowed appointers to sign by video in late 2023 and has since lapsed, so a parent visiting the children in the United States cannot sign there.

The lawyer is not any lawyer. The document is drafted on a dedicated online form by a member of the Israel Bar who has completed the Administrator General's training course, and it cannot be drafted as an ordinary document at all. The lawyer must explain the alternatives, must explain the consequences to the appointer without the appointee in the room, must be satisfied that the signature is free of pressure, and may not have a personal interest in the document or serve as appointee under it. Deposit with the Administrator General, done online by the lawyer with the original delivered within fourteen days, is a condition of validity. An undeposited enduring power is not a weaker document; it is no document.

The appointee, in Hebrew miyupeh koach, is the child. The law treats the role as one of trust, not profession, so the appointee must be an individual over eighteen, may not be the drafting lawyer, a paid caregiver or housing provider (unless a relative), or, for property matters, an undischarged bankrupt or a customer Bank of Israel has severely restricted. There is no requirement that the appointee live in Israel or hold Israeli citizenship. What the appointee must do is consent, in writing, before a lawyer, after the lawyer has explained the powers and duties, and sign a confidentiality waiver so the Administrator General can check eligibility.

Until 2022 that consent meant a flight. Since February 14, 2022, the Administrator General permits the appointee to sign by video call with the Israeli lawyer, with no physical meeting, and Israeli lawyers now routinely appoint children in Toronto, Los Angeles and New Jersey this way. The document can name more than one appointee, acting jointly or separately, can divide matters between them, and can name a substitute. For a family with one child in the United States and one in Israel, the usual answer is both, with the document saying which decisions need both signatures.

Who	Where they must be	What they must do
Appointer (the parent)	Israeli resident; signs in person, in Israel	Understand the document; sign before the certified lawyer; receive Administrator General reminders every three years
Drafting lawyer	Israel Bar, certified by the Administrator General	Explain alternatives and consequences; assess capacity; draft on the official form; deposit online
Appointee (the child)	Anywhere; no residency or citizenship condition	Consent in writing before a lawyer, in person or by video since February 2022; sign confidentiality waiver
Informed persons (optional)	Anywhere	Receive notice when the document takes effect and reports on the appointee's decisions, as the appointer chose

The document covers three kinds of matters and the appointer chooses which. Property matters mean the bank accounts, the pension and keren hishtalmut payouts, the apartment, the investments. Personal matters mean where the parent lives, daily care, community, religious and cultural life. Medical matters mean treatment decisions and can be handled inside this document or in a separate medical-only enduring power that a doctor, nurse, social worker or psychologist may witness. The appointer may also write advance instructions, hanchayot mekdimot, telling the appointee how to decide: sell the apartment only if home care becomes impossible, keep paying the grandson's tuition, never move me out of Jerusalem. Those instructions bind the appointee unless the parent, at the time, objects to what they say.

When it wakes up

An enduring power of attorney sits dormant in the Administrator General's registry for years. It takes effect only when two things happen. First, the condition the appointer set is met. The law does not allow that condition to be the appointee's own unaided judgment that the parent no longer understands, which is the one safeguard the legislature insisted on. It can be a specialist medical opinion, which is the default and the most common choice; it can be the joint judgment of the appointee and a named relative or friend; or it can be a defined event such as a psychiatric admission. Second, the appointee files a declaration with the Administrator General that the condition has been met and that the informed persons have been told. The declaration is a condition of the document taking effect. The Administrator General then stamps the document with the deposit date and the effective date, sends notice to the parent and the informed persons, and from that day the child acts.

For the daughter in Teaneck, that sequence is the difference between a scan the branch refuses and a document the branch must accept. It is also a sequence she can run from New Jersey: the medical opinion comes from the parent's Israeli doctor, the declaration is filed online through the government identification system, and the stamped copy is what she presents. Nothing in it requires a court.

What the child can and cannot do under it

Once in force, the appointee may take any decision and do any act the parent could have taken in the matters the document covers, with three tiers of limits that the American child needs to understand before the first bank transfer.

Tier	What it covers	What the child needs
Never delegable	Converting religion, voting, consenting to adoption, making or changing a will, acts under the Dying Patient Law	Nothing will authorize these; the parent alone could do them
Express authorization in the document	Donations, gifts and loans, each capped at 100,000 shekels cumulatively unless the document says otherwise; certain other listed acts	The document must name the recipients and amounts, or the act is outside the child's power
Prior approval	Selling, transferring or mortgaging the apartment; any real estate transaction other than a lease of up to five years; renouncing or transferring the parent's share in someone else's estate; unusual gifts, or gifts above the document's cap or 100,000 shekels; any other act, or linked acts in one transaction, above 500,000 shekels	Application to the Administrator General under section 74A, which may approve it or refer it to the Family Court

Two of those lines matter more than the rest for a cross-border family. The first is the apartment. A child who plans to fund a parent's care by selling the Tel Aviv flat cannot simply sign the contract; the sale needs prior approval, and the approval process asks what the parent's position is and whether the sale contradicts any advance instructions the parent wrote. Renting the flat for up to five years does not need approval, which is why Israeli lawyers often advise families to plan on rental income before sale. When the sale does happen, the Israeli and American tax mechanics on selling an Israeli apartment from the US apply with one difference: the seller is the living parent, so it is the parent's mas shevach exemption history and, if the parent is a US person, the parent's US return that carry the gain.

The second is the estate line. If the parent's own sibling or spouse dies while the enduring power is in force, the child cannot renounce the parent's share on the parent's behalf without approval. That is the same act, histalkut, that the disclaimer page analyzes from the American side, and a child who is also a US person should read that page before asking for the approval, because a renunciation that shifts assets toward the child has its own US gift consequences.

Until August 2025 every approval on the third tier went to the Family Court. Amendment 21, published in August 2024 and in force a year later, moved the first stop to the Administrator General, which can now approve administratively and must send the file to court only where the parent objects, the request contradicts deposited instructions, or the Administrator General decides not to handle it. For a child abroad that is a real change in speed, and it is recent enough that some of the Israeli lawyer's instincts about timing may predate it.

The appointee is not paid unless the document says so and sets the amount. Reasonable expenses, including flights for the purpose of the role, are reimbursable from the parent's funds. The appointee must keep records of substantive decisions, must register a note of the enduring power against the parent's real estate and other registered assets, and can be required by the document to file an inventory and accounts with the Administrator General in the way a guardian does. Whether to build that supervision in is the parent's choice at signing, and for a family with one child abroad and others in Israel it is often the clause that keeps the peace.

The three American filings that follow the child home

The Israeli lawyer's work ends at the deposit. The American work begins at activation. There are three questions, and which of them bite depends on one fact the Israeli file does not record: whether the parent, as well as the child, is a US person.

The child's FBAR. From the day the enduring power takes effect over property matters, the child has signature authority over the parent's Israeli bank, brokerage and pension-payout accounts. A US person with signature or other authority over foreign financial accounts must file FinCEN Form 114 for any year in which the aggregate maximum value of those accounts exceeds $10,000, whether or not the person has any financial interest in them. An elderly parent's Israeli accounts almost always exceed that. The child reports them in the signature-authority part of the form, files electronically with FinCEN by April 15 with an automatic extension to October 15, and keeps doing so every year the document is in force. The parent's accounts do not go on the child's Form 8938, which requires an interest in the asset rather than authority over it. The reporting mechanics and the penalties for missing the form are set out on the FBAR page for an inherited Israeli account; the difference here is that the filing starts while the parent is alive and the child owns nothing.

The parent's IRS relationship, if the parent is a US person. A parent who made aliyah from the United States and kept the passport still files a Form 1040 and an FBAR every year, and once the enduring power is in force the child is the one who has to get them filed. Signing a return for an incapacitated parent and dealing with the IRS on the parent's behalf requires a recognized power of attorney, which for the IRS means Form 2848. The parent can no longer sign one. The regulations provide the way through. Under 26 CFR 601.503(b)(3), the attorney-in-fact under a durable power may execute a Form 2848 on the taxpayer's behalf, attach the underlying power, and add a statement under penalty of perjury that the power is valid under the law of the jurisdiction where it was made, provided the underlying power contemplates federal tax matters, for example by giving authority to perform any and all acts. An Israeli enduring power of attorney can meet that test, but only if it was drafted with the test in mind: a document limited to "managing the bank account at Bank Leumi" may not. The IRS will also want a certified English translation of a Hebrew document. Where the power cannot be made to work, the fallback the IRS describes is a court-appointed fiduciary and a Form 56, which for an Israeli parent means an Israeli guardianship order translated and apostilled, the very thing the enduring power was meant to avoid. Ask the Israeli lawyer to write the tax clause before signing, not after.

Gifts, in both directions. Israeli law gates gifts by the appointee: they need express authorization, a named recipient, and a cap, and above 100,000 shekels they need approval. American law taxes them. If the parent is a US person, a gift the child makes from the parent's funds to a grandchild, a sibling, or the child's own household is the parent's gift for US purposes, and above the $19,000 annual exclusion for 2026 it belongs on a Form 709 filed in the parent's name, which the child will be signing. If the parent is not a US person and the child is, the direction reverses: money the child receives from the parent's Israeli assets, including under the enduring power, is a foreign gift the child reports on Form 3520 once it passes $100,000 in a year, on the rules laid out on the Form 3520 page. And a US-person child who pays for the parent's Israeli care from the child's own pocket, rather than from the parent's accounts, is making gifts to the parent, with one relief worth knowing: under 26 USC 2503(e), amounts paid directly to a medical provider for another person's medical care are not gifts at all, without limit. Paying the nursing home directly and paying the parent so the parent can pay the nursing home are different transactions on a US return.

The through-line is that Israeli law asks whether the child had authority, and American law asks whose money moved and to whom. The enduring power answers the first question and is silent on the second.

The parent's American assets need an American document

The enduring power of attorney is an Israeli instrument and works on Israeli institutions. A parent who left the United States with an IRA, a brokerage account, a Social Security benefit and perhaps a house in Florida has assets that the Israeli document will not reach, for the mirror-image reason the US durable power does not reach Israel. US custodians want their own forms or a US-law durable power; a Hebrew document stamped by the Administrator General will at best go to the legal department and at worst be refused.

One American asset refuses every power of attorney. Treasury regulations do not recognize general powers of attorney for recurring federal benefit payments, and the Social Security Administration states in plain terms that having power of attorney is not the same as being a payee and gives no authority to negotiate or manage a beneficiary's benefits. A child who will manage a parent's Social Security has to apply to SSA to become a representative payee, a separate process with its own investigation and annual accounting, which SSA runs regardless of what any US or Israeli document says. Parents can name an advance designation of representative payee while still competent, and for a family planning the Israeli enduring power that is the American step to take in the same season.

The pattern is the same one this site describes for wills: two documents, one for each country, each drafted to know that the other exists. The Israeli enduring power governs the Israeli accounts, the apartment, the care decisions and the medical decisions in Israel. A US durable power of attorney, signed under the law of the state where the child lives or where the assets sit, governs the IRA, the brokerage account and the Florida house, and is drafted to satisfy the IRS regulation so that a Form 2848 can be built on it. The two should name the same people, or explain why they do not, and neither should purport to revoke the other.

	Israeli enduring power of attorney	US durable power of attorney
Governs	Israeli accounts, real estate, personal and medical decisions in Israel	US accounts, US real estate, IRS representation, most US institutions
Made before	Lawyer certified by the Administrator General, in Israel, on the official form	Notary and witnesses under state law
Takes effect	On the condition the parent set, plus the appointee's declaration to the Administrator General	On signing, or on incapacity if drafted as springing
Registered	Deposit with the Administrator General is a condition of validity	Usually a private document; some states offer registration
Does not reach	US custodians, Social Security, the IRS without a Form 2848 built on it	Israeli banks, the Tabu, Israeli health funds, the Israeli courts
Ends	Parent's death, with a ninety-day tail for property matters; appointee's death; revocation; court order	Parent's death; revocation; court order

When the parent dies

Every power of attorney ends at death, and the enduring power is no exception. The Israeli document gives the property appointee a narrow ninety-day tail: without going to court, the child may pay current bills for services given while the document was in force, pay reasonable burial and mourning expenses, and keep managing a rented flat or an asset that needs upkeep. The child may not distribute anything, and must report the expiry to the Administrator General online. After that the child holds the parent's property for the heirs, the executor if one is appointed, or whoever the court directs.

What comes next is the part of the map the rest of this site covers. The Israeli accounts freeze on the death certificate, as the frozen-account page explains, and the enduring power will not unfreeze them; only a succession order or probate order from the Registrar of Inheritance Affairs does that, on the process described on getting an Israeli succession order from abroad and probate in Israel for US heirs. A child who was the appointee is often the natural candidate to be appointed mnahel izbon as well, and the estate-administrator page sets out what that role means from the United States and which American filings it carries. Several of them, the FBAR above all, are ones the child will already have been making for years by then.

What to ask, and who to ask it of

Ask the Israeli lawyer certified to draft enduring powers, while the parent still clearly understands:

• Whether the parent's capacity is clear enough to proceed without a specialist opinion, and if not, which specialist and how the opinion is attached.
• Which matters to include, who the appointees are, how a child abroad and a child in Israel divide decisions, who the substitute is, and who the informed persons are.
• How the activation condition is written, since the child abroad will be the one filing the declaration, and whether a named Israeli doctor or relative should be part of it.
• Whether the property clause is broad enough to satisfy the IRS regulation, in words the American attorney has seen, and whether express authority for gifts, tuition and family support is written in with amounts.
• Whether to require accounts to the Administrator General, and what the parent wants in the advance instructions about the apartment, home care and place of residence.

Ask the US estate attorney, with the Israeli draft and its translation in hand:

• Whether a US durable power of attorney under the child's or the assets' state law should be signed in the same season, and whether it needs to be executed during a visit.
• Whether the Israeli document, as drafted, will support a Form 2848 under 601.503(b)(3), and what the translation and perjury statement should say.
• Whether an advance designation of representative payee with Social Security should be filed now.

Ask the US accountant, before the document takes effect:

• When the child's FBAR obligation over the parent's Israeli accounts begins, and how the accounts will be valued and converted each year.
• If the parent is a US person, how the parent's 1040, FBAR and any Form 709 will be prepared and signed from now on, and by whom.
• If the parent is not a US person, when transfers to the child become Form 3520 events, and how care paid by the child should be routed.

And ask the family the question that only it can answer: who does the parent actually want making these decisions, and does that person know it? The Israeli document exists to record that answer while it can still be given. The American filings are the price of carrying it out.