Finding a Deceased Relative's Money in Israel: The Free Government Search That Says Where but Never How Much, the Login an American Heir Cannot Pass, and the Fifteen-Year Clock at the Custodian General

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 mother makes aliyah from Skokie in 1998 and dies in Netanya in 2026. Her daughter in Chicago flies in for the shiva, comes home with the apartment keys and a phone she cannot unlock, and only then confronts the question that precedes every other question on this site: where is the money?

Not how is it taxed, not how is it claimed. Where is it. The paper statements stopped arriving a decade ago when the banks went digital. The mother mentioned a pension once, maybe two, and something from an old employer in the nineties. Israel has more than a dozen banks, dozens of insurance companies and pension houses, and no probate process that begins by handing the family an inventory. An Israeli succession proceeding names the heirs; it does not find the assets. That job belongs to the heirs, and most American heirs do not know the tools exist.

They do exist. Israel built a central, free, government-run search for exactly this problem. It has real power and three specific blind spots, and an American heir needs to understand both halves.

The search that knows where, and refuses to say how much

The tool is called Har HaKesef, literally "the mountain of money," launched by the Ministry of Finance in 2013 and today run by the Capital Market, Insurance and Savings Authority at hakesef.cma.gov.il. It exists because Israelis, like Americans, change jobs and leave pension accounts behind, and because institutions hold billions of shekels whose owners forgot them or died without telling anyone. The service has a dedicated track for locating the money of a deceased relative, and it is free, which matters, because a small industry of private "asset locators" charges families for searches the state performs at no cost.

The deceased-person track covers the institutional side of Israeli savings: pension funds, provident funds (kupot gemel), study funds (kranot hishtalmut), life insurance policies with a savings component, and death-benefit-only policies. For a deceased person it reports accounts both active and inactive, which is broader than the living-person search. A parallel track, built on Bank of Israel data, covers bank accounts and dormant deposits, and Israeli banking law is specific about what dormant means: under the Banking Ordinance, 1941, a deposit becomes a dormant deposit once ten months pass without an instruction from its owner, at which point the bank is required to try to reach the owner and, failing that, to park the money in prescribed investments rather than let it evaporate in fees.

What the search returns is deliberately thin. It tells you which institutions hold something registered to the deceased's ID number, with the institution's contact details, and nothing more. No balances, no account types, no beneficiary names. The design is a pointer, not a statement: the state tells you where to knock, and the institution behind each door decides what to show you once you prove you are an heir. The search is also capped, ten searches per ID number, so the family should run it deliberately, save the results, and not burn attempts re-checking. The data refreshes monthly from institutional reporting, so a search run the week after death can miss what a search run two months later finds.

There is one more registry worth a pass: Har HaBituach, the Capital Market Authority's parallel database of insurance policies, which can surface a policy the savings-side search does not. And one tool that does not help, despite its name coming up constantly: the Pension Clearing House (Mislaka Pensionit) is built for living savers reviewing their own accounts, not for heirs, and a family that tries to route the search through it loses time.

The login an American heir cannot pass

Here is the catch this site exists to write about. Every track of the search runs through Israel's national digital identification, the government login used across state websites, and that login is built on the Israeli identity card. The searcher, not just the deceased, identifies with an Israeli ID number, its issue date, and a code sent to a phone. The bank track asks for the searcher's ID number and issue date, then the deceased's ID number and date of death.

An American heir who never held Israeli citizenship has no teudat zehut, no issue date, and no way through the front door. The daughter in Chicago, born in Skokie, cannot run the search for her mother in Netanya, no matter how many documents she holds proving she is the only heir.

The workarounds are ordinary but worth stating plainly. An Israeli relative, a sibling who stayed, a cousin in Ra'anana, can run the search from their own login; the deceased track asks about the deceased, and proof of the relationship and of heir status enters the process later, when institutions are approached. Failing that, the family's Israeli lawyer, who is usually already engaged for the succession order, treats the location work as part of the same file. And failing everything, there is the pre-2013 method: writing to each bank and each institution separately, with the succession order attached, and waiting for each answer. It works. It is just slow, and it only finds what you already suspected.

The second blind spot is quieter and more dangerous. The search keys exclusively on Israeli ID numbers. An account registered to a passport number, a foreign identity document, or a company does not surface at all. American families hit this constantly: a parent who lived in Israel for years without taking citizenship, or who opened accounts as a foreign resident on a US passport before eventually becoming Israeli, can have money sitting in an Israeli bank that the national search is structurally incapable of seeing. For those accounts the family is back to letters, this time guided by whatever paper trail the apartment gives up: old statements, checkbooks, a lawyer's name on a decades-old contract, the phone if it ever unlocks.

From a list of doors to money that moves

Finding the institutions is the fast part. Each one then runs its own claims process, and each demands the same core document: the Israeli succession order (tzav yerusha) if there was no will, or probate order (tzav kiyum tzava'a) if there was one. The order is the key that opens every door on the list, which is why locating assets and obtaining the order run in parallel, not in sequence. One paperwork wrinkle catches old files: an order issued before 2013 by a body other than the Inheritance Registrar or a rabbinical court has to be presented in the original or as a copy certified true by the issuer or an attorney, so a family reopening a decades-old estate should not mail its only original anywhere.

Two warnings before anything is withdrawn. First, pension and provident money has its own tax logic, and the wrong withdrawal at the wrong time can trigger Israeli tax that patience would have avoided; the keren hishtalmut and pension page walks that terrain, and for a US-person heir the American layer makes rushing doubly expensive. Second, institutional accounts pay attention to beneficiary registrations, not only to the will, and on old accounts those registrations are often decades stale. A life insurance policy or pension with a named beneficiary pays past the estate entirely, sometimes to a person the deceased stopped speaking to in 1994. Ask each institution who is registered before assuming the succession order controls the outcome.

Time, at least, is on the family's side on the Israeli end. Practitioners in the field note that claims to pension money are not extinguished by the years; funds have been recovered decades after a death. Israeli banks, similarly, do not get to keep a dormant account because nobody asked; the money waits, invested under the Bank of Israel's dormant-deposit rules. Waiting is not free, old accounts can bleed management fees, but the claim itself does not expire.

The Custodian General, and the clock that does run out

One Israeli institution does operate on a deadline, and it is the one holding the assets nobody found in time. When property in Israel appears abandoned, its owner missing or dead with no heir stepping forward, the Ministry of Justice's Custodian General takes it into management under the Custodian General Law, 5738-1978, by order of the District Court. The Unit for Locating and Returning Abandoned Assets holds these assets in trust for their private owners and publishes a searchable list of missing owners, roughly seventeen thousand names, and unlike Har HaKesef, that list is public: no Israeli login, searchable by name from Chicago at two in the morning. About ninety percent of the records are money and deposits; most of the rest is real estate, some of it pre-state land whose owners' grandchildren have no idea it exists. Holocaust-era assets are handled by a dedicated department of their own.

Reclaiming from the Custodian General is a formal restitution application: proof of the owner's identity, proof of the applicant's right as heir, a committee with discretion over how much evidence the file needs, and management fees deducted for the years the state spent minding the property, with a reduction available on request. It is slower and more demanding than claiming from a bank, and it comes with the one deadline in this entire subject: after fifteen years in management without a claimant, the asset passes to state ownership. An American family that has a vague memory of a grandfather's plot near Haifa, or an aunt who died in the eighties with no children, should search the list before assuming the trail is cold. For anything already deep into its fifteen years, the search is urgent in a way nothing else on this page is.

The day something is found, America starts counting

Every discovery on the Israeli side eventually lands on a US tax return, and the reporting clocks start at receipt, not at the end of the family's project. A US-person heir whose bequests from the estate top $100,000 in a year reports them on Form 3520 for that year, and the penalty regime for missing it is grim enough that the form belongs on the checklist the same week the first institution pays out. An Israeli account retitled into the heir's name, or one the heir can sign on while the estate is administered, counts toward the FBAR and Form 8938 thresholds measured by account values during the year, not by intentions. And located money that turns out to be sitting in Israeli mutual funds drags in the PFIC rules, where the smart move is usually deciding what to do before taking the funds in kind, not after.

None of this changes the order of operations. Find the doors with the free search, or through an Israeli relative or lawyer when the login wall blocks the direct route. Get the succession order moving in parallel. Knock on each door with the order, ask who the registered beneficiaries are, and do not withdraw pension money until someone has looked at both countries' tax picture. Check the Custodian General's public list for the older, colder trails. And loop in a cross-border accountant the day the first shekel moves, because the American paperwork does not wait for the last door to open.

The mountain of money is real, and it is patient. The only parts of this that are not patient are the fifteen-year clock in Jerusalem and the reporting clocks in Washington, and now you know where all three are ticking.