Grandparents Rights

Seniors turn to New Family for assistance in legal issues surrounding new relationships they enter later in life, property and inheritance issues, planning and executing wills, getting pensions, social security payments, and survivor’s benefits, and maintaining relationships with grandchildren in cases of estrangement.

New Family runs an information hotline for grandparents that advise grandparents who are estranged from their grandchildren. Estrangement may follow their children’s divorce from the grandchildren’s other parent, by the death of their child, the grandchild’s parent, by relocation, or a family dispute. Our attorneys give grandparents legal advice on their rights and obligations vis a vis their grandchildren. The hotline can be reached at 03 566 0504, Sunday-Thursday, 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Dozens of grandparents have begun the process of reconciling differences with their family members and in appropriate cases, could be assisted in legal proceedings to gain visitation rights.

New Family drafted and triggered the passing of the Grandparent’s Rights Law in cooperation with Ilan Gilon and other legislators, called the ‘Minors Right to Contact with Relatives Law’, which allows grandmothers and grandfathers whose children have severed ties with their grandchildren to see them. We estimate that 300,000 people in Israel suffer from involuntary estrangement between grandparent and grandchild as a result of divorce, dispute, or bereavement. Since the amendment, we are inundated with inquiries, indicating the scope of the need for regulation of the problem.

Advocate Irit Rosenblum was the first to articulate a right to biological grandparenthood and paved the way to exercising the right to grandparenthood through Biological Wills™. When a court of law determines that it was the wish of the deceased to father a child even in the event of his death, Biological Wills™ offers bereaved parents the ability to have a genetic grandchild by carrying out the will of their deceased son to donate his sperm to a woman who wishes to have a child. Like a child born in any other circumstances, the child is the sole responsibility of the child’s mother and the grandparents have no legal rights or obligations towards the child. Biological Wills™ allow the intended mother to know the identity of her child’s father and to form an extended family for her child is she wishes.