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 20 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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One Response
Actually under Torah law, its more complicated. The wife’s share while modest, will often exceed the value of the estate for a middle class person, and she has a lien on the estate that takes priority over creditors. Duplicating that under American law is difficult (try getting a bank to agree that if you die, your wife gets all the assets and the banks gets stiffed). And sons don’t really inherit absolutely, since they retain an obligation to support their mother and unmarried sisters (inheritance subject to a condition, perhaps seen as a life estate for the mother or some sort of implied trust).
For most Americans, the major “assets” of a person are the right to government benefits (the king is allowed to give pensions from his tax revenue) which you have little control over, and in some places a house which under American law (and since the “king” owned the land, his law governs) is typically owned by the entireties meaning at the husbands death it becomes the wife’s separate property retroactively). When the wife’s right to support (hopefully most men’s daughters are long since married off by the time the man dies) exceeds the net value of the assets that can be disposed of by will, the question is “moot”. For most people, a three line will is enough (“wife gets all”).
Of course appointing guardians is important if there are minor children, especially for a Baal Tsuvah. But that’s a different matter. And rich people have a real need for a will. And Baruch ha-Shem, under American law debts are not inherited.