A temporary move abroad can carry lasting legal consequences for Israelis - interview

SEPTEMBER 18, 2026 15:53As Israeli families abroad prepare for the holidays, one familiar question may hover over the festive table: When are you coming home?The answer may be after the degree, after the next contract, or simply not yet. A family can live with that uncertainty for years. The law, however, may begin answering the question before the family does.A child may come to be considered habitually resident in another country even while the parents continue to describe the move as temporary. If the parents later separate, one may not be able to bring the children back to Israel without the other parent’s consent or a court order.“Once things go wrong, each parent can claim the opposite,” family and inheritance lawyer Judith Meisels told the Magazine in an interview. One may say the family always intended to return to Israel; the other may argue that, whatever the original plan, they built a life elsewhere.What began as an informal family decision can then affect where a dispute over the children is heard, where divorce proceedings take place, which law applies to the couple’s property, and how assets in several countries are handled after a death.FAMILY/INHERITANCE LAWYER Judith Meisels. (credit: Ohad Dayan)People do not always realize how many international questions can arise in family law, Meisels said. Families may marry in one country, live in another, and retain property or legal ties in Israel, without considering what would happen if they later separated.The statisticsThe number of Israelis moving abroad has risen in recent years. A Central Bureau of Statistics release published in September 2024 classified 55,300 Israelis as long-term emigrants in its 2023 statistical cohort, up from about 38,000 a year earlier. That does not mean all 55,300 left in 2023: They first left in 2022 and were classified only after a year-long monitoring period. To qualify, they had spent at least 275 days abroad during that year, including the first 90 days continuously.A later Knesset Research and Information Center report, using updated CBS data and listing emigrants by their year of departure, put the number at 59,400 in 2022, 82,800 in 2023 and a provisional 69,500 in 2024. The figures cannot be compared directly with those in the earlier release because the two publications assign the year differently and the later report uses updated data.Looking at the broader population already overseas, the Institute for Jewish Policy Research estimated that approximately 630,000 Israelis or former Israeli residents lived abroad in 2021-2023. Including an estimated 325,000 children born to Israelis abroad brought the wider “Israel-connected” population to approximately 955,000, although that figure is not a count of Israeli citizens.The child factorFor families with children, the most immediate legal question is the child’s habitual residence – essentially, the country that has become the practical center of the child’s life.Courts look at “where children wake up, where they are, and how they see the center of their lives,” Meisels said. They may also consider the parents’ last shared plan for where the family would live.The concept is central to the 1980 Hague Convention on international child abduction, which operates among more than 100 countries. The convention is intended to secure the return of children who have been wrongfully taken from or kept outside the country of their habitual residence.A Hague proceeding decides whether the child should be returned; it does not decide custody. If the child is returned, the custody dispute will generally be heard in the country where the child was habitually resident.There is no fixed period after which a child automatically acquires a new habitual residence. The precise test varies, but courts may consider where the child lives and attends school, how settled the child has become, and what the parents intended.Meisels gave the example of a couple who leaves Israel for a defined purpose, such as a postdoctoral program. The original plan may be relatively clear: The family will return when the program ends.The position becomes less certain if the family stays for a job afterward without agreeing on a new return date.“One parent says, ‘We only traveled to the US for the postdoc, and we were supposed to return,’” she said. “The other says, ‘No, we decided to try our luck in the US without an end date.’”A court may then examine how the family actually lived: whether the parents sold or retained property in Israel, what they told relatives and friends, where the children attended school, and how settled the family became abroad.Meisels therefore advises parents moving abroad with children to record the purpose and expected duration of the move, along with what should happen if one parent wants to return earlier.“If Israelis are thinking of leaving the country with their children for more than a vacation, then in addition to making sure the passports are not expired and packing the right things, they need to seek legal advice,” she said.A written agreement can provide important evidence of what the parents understood at the time. It does not, however, necessarily determine the child’s habitual residence or bind the court hearing a later dispute – a court may consider the agreement alongside everything the family did after signing it.Meisels said the question is particularly difficult for families that left Israel after Oct. 7 or during later periods of fighting without deciding whether they were relocating permanently or simply waiting for security conditions to improve.In those cases, one parent may also argue that returning a child to Israel would be dangerous.The Hague Convention allows a court to refuse a child’s return when there is a grave risk that returning would expose the child to physical or psychological harm or otherwise place the child in an intolerable situation. The existence of a war does not produce an automatic result: The court must examine the circumstances facing the particular child.“It really depends,” Meisels said. She described being retained to provide an expert opinion in a US Hague Convention case in which a parent argued that returning a child to Israel would expose the child to grave risk following a missile attack.“The judge was very surprised,” she said. “The way she perceived what was going on here, it seemed to her like everybody was being struck by missiles.”Meisels also pointed to a Portuguese child-return case in which the lower and appellate courts reached opposing conclusions. The subsequent official record shows that the case took another turn after the appeal.An Israeli mother traveled to Portugal with her six-year-old daughter on October 17, 2023, after both parents agreed that the child would leave Israel temporarily following the Oct. 7 attack. When the mother did not return the child, the father sought the child’s return through the Hague Convention.A Portuguese trial court declined to order the return. The Lisbon Court of Appeal later reversed that decision in a divided ruling, finding that the war, without evidence of a concrete danger to the child in Tel Aviv, was insufficient to establish the grave-risk exception. It ordered the child returned to Israel.Portugal’s Supreme Court subsequently denied the return request on November 26, 2024, according to a later official court record.The sequence illustrates the uncertainty Meisels described: Neither Israel’s broader security situation nor the fact that a family initially left because of the war necessarily determines the outcome. Different courts examining the same case reached different conclusions.The divorce factorChildren are only one part of the legal picture. A move abroad can also divide a divorce between two legal systems. A Jewish couple may divorce civilly in the country where they live but, if they married according to Jewish law, still need a religious divorce, or get.If both spouses agree, a rabbinical court can sometimes arrange the get through an authorized representative, allowing the couple to remain in different countries.Israeli law also allows the rabbinical courts to hear certain get-refusal cases involving couples abroad, but only in situations specifically set out by law.“There are many Israelis who travel abroad and don’t really feel at home there,” Meisels said. “They don’t know the language, they don’t have a supportive family there, they don’t have lawyers. For these people to suddenly find themselves in a different legal system is a problem.”The property factorProperty disputes create a further set of questions: Which court can hear the case, which country’s law will it apply, and will its eventual decision take effect elsewhere?An Israeli couple may own an apartment in Israel, a home in the country where they now live, and financial assets in both. The court hearing the divorce may not be the only court or legal system that becomes involved.An Israeli couple whose assets and lives are entirely in the United States may be able to conduct the divorce and divide their property there “just like any other American couple,” Meisels said. The position becomes more complicated when one spouse approaches an Israeli court, or the couple retains assets in Israel.Under Israeli law, the property rules that ordinarily apply are those of the country where the couple made their home when they married – not necessarily the country where the wedding took place.Real estate may also require proceedings or other legal work in the country where it is located. In some cases, Meisels said, lawyers in Israel and in the country where the couple lives will need to work together.A court order from one country does not automatically take effect in another. In Israel, a foreign judgment generally must be declared enforceable by an Israeli court before it can be carried out here.The same complications arise in inheritance.One option for someone with substantial assets, particularly real estate, in two countries is to prepare a separate will in each, Meisels said. The lawyers preparing the documents should know about both wills so that they do not conflict.Under Israeli law, an estate is generally governed by the law of the country where the deceased’s life was centered at the time of death – not simply the country in which the person happened to die.If most of the assets are in Israel and only one or two are abroad, such as a foreign bank account, Meisels said another option is an Israeli will that identifies the foreign assets. The heirs may still need a separate legal process in the country where those assets are held.The common problem running through each of these areas is that a family’s legal connections do not move from one country to another all at once.Children may become habitually resident abroad while property remains subject to proceedings in Israel, or a divorce may require steps in both a civil court overseas and a rabbinical court here.Planning cannot prevent every disagreement or dictate what a court will decide, but it can preserve evidence of the family’s plans and leave fewer questions to fight over later.FOR FAMILIES who just marked another Rosh Hashanah overseas, another year abroad does not automatically change the legal answer. But arrangements left undefined can carry consequences over time.A family does not need to decide where it will live forever. It should, however, write down what it has decided for now.■Follow us on Google