How to Find Out If Your Great-Grandfather Bought Land in Israel

Yes, a family story about land bought in Eretz Israel can usually be tested. Start by collecting the buyer's name in every spelling, the town he lived in, rough dates and any place or company name, then check those details against land-registry entries, land-company files and archive records. The result may be land still registered in his name, land that changed hands long ago, or no trace at all, and the records are the only way to know which.

Many Jewish families in New York, London, Johannesburg, Buenos Aires or Melbourne share some version of the same story: "Zayde bought a plot in Palestine before the war." This guide sets out a practical order of work so that the story can be checked calmly and properly.

Why is this story so common?

Buying land in Eretz Israel from abroad was a real and widespread practice. In the 1920s and 1930s, American and European Jews bought plots through land companies, purchase societies and private agents. In 1927 the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported that the Palestine government's Land Office had registered more than 1,400 deeds issued to buyers by one American Jewish land company. In 1929 a Zionist official said of another American company, the American Zion Commonwealth, that "the majority of purchasers are in the United States."

According to a 2014 report in Globes, diaspora Jews of the Mandate period bought land in several ways:

• directly;
• through a lawyer holding power of attorney;
• in groups, including religious associations;
• in some cases, with the purchase linked to a £1,000 deposit that secured a faster immigration permit.

Many intended to make aliyah (immigrate to Eretz Israel) later. Some never did, and the land, or the paperwork, was forgotten.

Step 1: What details should the family collect first?

Before contacting any archive, write down everything the family knows. Precision matters more than quantity.

Names in every form

Records from this period were kept in more than one language and script, and a name could be spelt differently in each. One 2022 Times of Israel report describes a Petah Tikva plot whose Mandate-era English entry was copied into Hebrew after 1948, with errors in the owners' names that made them hard to identify.

So list:

• the buyer's name as it appears on his passport, naturalisation papers or gravestone abroad;
• his Hebrew name (for example from a ketubah, a gravestone or a synagogue record);
• Yiddish or other forms used at home, and older spellings from the country he came from;
• the names of his wife, brothers and business partners. Land was sometimes bought jointly or registered to a relative.

Where he lived and when

Write down the town or city where the buyer lived at the time of the purchase, and his address if anyone knows it. The hometown can matter: Globes reported on plots linked to a purchasing group from Lodz, and families should also ask whether the buyer belonged to a landsmanshaft (an association of Jews from the same hometown) or a synagogue society that might have bought together. Note the approximate years. "Before the war" and "after he came back from his visit" are useful clues.

Place names and other clues

Any place name the family remembers is valuable: a town, a moshava (an early Jewish agricultural village), a neighbourhood, an orchard, a "plot near the sea". Be aware that names change. Haaretz described a deed that referred to a former Arab village whose site is now a park in Ra'anana. Also note the name of any land company, society or lawyer the family remembers.

Step 2: Look for papers at home

The single most useful step is often a careful search of drawers, suitcases, albums and old correspondence. A deed, a receipt, an instalment book or even an envelope with a Tel Aviv lawyer's address can turn a vague memory into a searchable lead. Our separate guide explains which documents at home can prove a land purchase and what each one can and cannot tell you.

Step 3: Which kinds of records exist?

Several separate record systems may hold traces of the same purchase. None of them is complete on its own.

The land registry: Ottoman, Mandate and Israeli

Land registration in the country goes back to the Ottoman land code of 1858. Government land registries, called Tapu, were established in 1859. The word, pronounced "Tabu", is still the everyday Hebrew name for the Israeli land registry.

A historical review by Najeh S. Tamim of An-Najah National University summarises the key changes under British rule:

Period	What happened to land registration
1917–1920	Registries closed; no land transactions allowed
1920	Registries reopened under the Land Transfer Ordinance; a Department of Land Registries took over the Tapu's functions
From 1928	A title registration system introduced. Each parcel had its own folio recording owners, charges and other interests
Throughout the Mandate	The older deeds system and the newer title system ran side by side, and registration was not made compulsory

Two practical points follow. First, land was mapped into numbered registration blocks, each split into numbered parcels. Israeli records are still organised by block (gush) and parcel (helka). Second, because registration was not compulsory, some purchases were never entered in the registry at all. More detail is in our guide to British Mandate land registration.

The Israeli land registry is an open register, and anyone can check the ownership of a registered property. The difficulty is finding the right parcel. Haaretz called searching the registry "a Sisyphean task", and the locators it profiled start from a parcel of interest and work back to the owner, not the reverse. Globes adds that researchers treat a last registry entry from before 1945, with no later activity, as a warning sign worth following up.

Land-company and purchase-society records

Many buyers abroad never dealt with the registry directly. They paid a company or a society, which bought a large tract and later divided it into plots. Where the files of such a company or society survive, they may name a buyer even if the registry entry is missing or misspelt. Globes describes researchers reviewing archival buyer records alongside registry entries and aerial photographs. Our guide to ahuza societies explains how such groups worked.

Archives in Israel

• The Central Zionist Archives in Jerusalem is the historic archive of the World Zionist Organization, the Jewish Agency and the Jewish National Fund. It also holds archives of institutions of the Jewish community in the Land of Israel and about 1,500 personal archives.
• The Israel State Archives holds records of the British Mandate government. A standard genealogy guide to Israel lists a section on "Land Registration and Land Settlement, 1920–1948" among its holdings.

Our guide to Israeli archives for land records covers these in more depth.

Step 4: What are the realistic outcomes?

Families should go in with open eyes. A search can lead to any of the following, and sometimes to more than one at once.

The land is still registered to the original buyer

This does happen. Haaretz reported on land locators who find parcels still registered to owners from before 1948, and on a woman in Chicago who learned she had inherited five dunams near Hadera. In the Petah Tikva case, the original owners' heirs were found in the United States, Canada and several European countries. When land passes to heirs, Israeli succession law works through formal orders. The Succession Law, 1965 distinguishes probate, succession and administration orders. See our guide on inheritance of land in Israel for heirs abroad.

The land is managed by the Administrator General

When owners could not be found, some land ended up under state management. Globes described a chain in which certain plots passed to the Mandate-era land trustee, then to Israel's Administrator General, and later to Hashava, a company set up to trace the heirs of Holocaust victims' assets. EHRI's directory says Hashava ceased its activities in 2017. In 2021 the Ministry of Justice published a notice that a list of Holocaust victims' assets transferred to the Administrator General's management had been published, and that restitution requests could be submitted through the company's website.

The land was expropriated

Land in Israel can be acquired by the state for public purposes. A 2009 paper by Nechama Bogin notes that expropriation is still largely carried out under a British Mandate law, the Land Ordinance (Acquisition for Public Purposes), 1943. The Planning and Building Law of 1965 refers to the same compensation principles. Whether any compensation is due in a given case is a legal question for a qualified Israeli lawyer.

The purchase was never completed, sold, or never registered

Some buyers paid in instalments that stopped. Globes notes that the Second World War halted payments. Some plots were sold, by the buyer or his heirs, decades ago. Some purchases were held only as private contracts and never reached the registry. A clear negative answer is still an answer, and it lets the family close the question.

Common pitfalls to avoid

• Relying on one spelling. Search every variant, and remember Hebrew transcription errors.
• Assuming a modern place name. The deed may use an Ottoman-era, Arabic or Mandate-era name.
• Confusing shares with land. A share certificate in a land company is not the same as a registered plot.
• Treating a contract as a title. A purchase contract or receipt shows intent and payment, not current ownership.
• Accepting quick offers. A lawyer quoted by Haaretz advised caution about lump-sum offers that may be far below a property's value, and against signing away rights before understanding a deal.
• Expecting certainty. Many leads end without a result. Rules and procedures can also change, so legal questions should always go to a qualified Israeli lawyer.

Where to go from here

Work in order: gather the details, search the family papers, then approach the records with specific names, places and dates. If you would like help, Jewish Lost Assets offers a free initial search of records of land bought in Eretz Israel by Jewish buyers abroad between the 1920s and the 1950s. If relevant documents are found, the family receives a preliminary summary and a clear quote and then decides whether to continue.