A Will is a legal document that provides specific instructions as to how a person’s assets should be distributed upon his or her death. In today’s society, the monetary laws of the Torah have unfortunately been largely disregarded even within the Orthodox community, mostly due to a lack of education and understanding of those laws. There is one area of monetary law which affects everyone – the laws of yerushah (inheritance). According to the Torah’s laws of inheritance, a man’s sons[1] are his sole heirs, each inheriting an equal share, except that when the oldest child is a son, the first born son would inherit a double share (as compared to his brothers). Jewish law provides for the man’s widow and unmarried daughters by giving them a lien against the man’s estate for their support until his widow remarries and until all his daughters get married, but the man’s widow and daughters do not inherit any property outright.
In contrast, under New York law, if no Will was ever written, a deceased person’s surviving spouse and children (including daughters) all have a right to share in the deceased person’s estate. If a Will was written, the deceased person’s assets would be distributed to whoever was named in the deceased person’s Will. However, a secular non-halachic Will has no halachic validity, which poses a real problem for an observant Jew. A secular non-halachic Will takes effect only after a person’s death, at which time the deceased person’s halachic heirs have automatically inherited the deceased’s assets, and the deceased person no longer has any halachic authority to transfer such possessions because those possessions no longer belong to the deceased person, but rather to his halachic heirs.
Furthermore, a person has no halachic right to accept assets inherited from an estate where the deceased person had no Will or had only a secular non-halachic Will because it is almost certain that there will be instances of gezel (theft) under Jewish law. Therefore, it is important for every Jewish person to not only write a Will but to make sure the Will conforms with Jewish law, making sure that the very last thing a person does in this world does not violate the Torah’s laws of yerushah.
The attorneys in the Trusts & Estates Practice Group at Yedid & Zeitoune, PLLC have consulted with many Orthodox rabbis and have obtained a p’sak halachah as to the proper way to write a halachic Will in order to avoid the halachic problems mentioned above. May we all merit living long, healthy and happy lives – amen.
The attorneys in the Trust & Estates Practice Group at Yedid & Zeitoune have a combined 15 years of legal experience and are ready to assist you with all your estate planning needs.
Isaac Yedid, Esq. and Raymond Zeitoune, Esq.
Yedid & Zeitoune, PLLC
1172 Coney Island Avenue Brooklyn, New York 11230
Phone: (347) 461-9800 Fax: (718) 421-1695 Email: [email protected]
NYC Office – By Appointment Only:
152 Madison Avenue, Suite 1105 New York, New York 10016
[1] If a man has no sons, the order of succession is as follows: (i) daughters, (ii) brothers, (iii) parents, (iv) uncles, and (v) next of kin.
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Unless you consider various federal programs, such as social security survivor benefits, to be part of the estate, most middle class men don’t have enough of an estate to cover the minimum payment due a wife, especially if you recognize that under local law in most states one’s real property (the house) passes automatically to the wife retroactive to the time it was acquired (and therefore can not be disposed of by will). There are reasons to think about a will, but for most men, a simple “All to wife” will dispose of their property according to halacha. Most Jewish men die before their wives (that’ssince women usually outlive men, and men tend to be older thentheir wives), and aren’t especially well off financially (something to do with raising houses full of frum kids, which cost a lot more than our secular cousins who leave behing at most one kid and a few pets). One also has to remember that in halacha children are required to support parents, meaning any grants to children would be in a form of trust to require them to support the elderly parent, and indeed, throughout the marriage one would need to structure all of one’s debts and assets so creditors (including banks and credit card companies) realize that the wife’s support comes before paying off creditors (it could be done by a clever lawyer, but it also means you’ll go through life unable to borrow money or get a credit card).