Raising a Child With Special Needs After Aliyah

Israel pays a monthly disabled child allowance, kitzvat yeled nache (קצבת ילד נכה), and the three basic parameters Bituach Leumi publishes for it are not financial ones. They ask whose child this is, where the child is, and who the child lives with. ¹ For a family that has just landed, that inversion is the whole story. The architecture you arrived with, whether a US special needs trust or simply a habit of keeping the child's name off anything, was built to survive a means test this Israeli benefit does not run. Meanwhile the Israeli claim you now need leans on paperwork that was issued in your old country and is probably still in a box.

> This is general information, not tax, legal, or financial advice. Cross-border (US/UK) and Israeli rules interact in complex ways, so consult a qualified cross-border professional before acting. Every disabled child allowance claim is also decided on the individual file by a Bituach Leumi physician and a claims officer, so nothing on this page predicts your own decision.

What does Israel pay for, and what does it never ask about?

Bituach Leumi publishes exactly three basic parameters, and none of them is financial. ¹ The child must be the child of an insured person who is an Israeli resident, or of a person who was insured and died a resident of Israel; the child must be located in Israel; and the child must live with a family, with published treatment for a child in an institution, a hospitalised child, and, following a legislative amendment of 1 June 2024, foster families. On top of those three, the child's situation must comply with the published list of medical conditions, impairments and treatments. Bituach Leumi states that the allowance is paid pursuant to the National Insurance Institute Regulations (Disabled Child), so that list is secondary legislation sitting under the National Insurance Law rather than text in the statute itself. ²¹⁶

Read the first parameter again, because it is the one that surprises newcomers. It turns on insured residency, not citizenship, and the three published parameters do not include a contribution record or a minimum period of residence. ¹ A family that landed six weeks ago is measured against the same three parameters as a family that has paid in for thirty years. Other Bituach Leumi benefits do count insured months before they pay anything, and those qualifying periods are set out on Bituach Leumi qualifying periods for olim.

There is also a clause on that same page that only an oleh will ever trigger. Bituach Leumi states that "a new immigrant child who immigrated without his parents may be eligible provided he or she immigrated with a guardian or other family member who is one of the following: a sibling, a grandparent, an uncle or aunt." ¹ It is the only sentence in the entitlement conditions addressed to a child who arrived in Israel without his parents.

Now the mechanic that most often gets carried across borders wrongly. Where a child has more than one qualifying impairment, Bituach Leumi says the benefit rate is based on the single impairment entitling him to the highest allowance amount. ²³ Two other systems a family in this position deals with do the arithmetic differently, and it is worth seeing all three side by side. On the US side, SSA's childhood test asks whether the child has "a medically determinable physical or mental impairment or impairments which result in marked and severe functional limitations," so more than one impairment can be read together to reach the standard. ¹⁸ On the Israeli adult side, the general disability pension weights several impairments rather than adding them: Bituach Leumi's own example turns a 20% back impairment and a 10% leg impairment into 28%, because the second is applied to the 80% left after the first. ²⁶ Israel's child allowance does neither. It picks one impairment and prices it. Bringing a home-country instinct to add or combine will make you over-predict the rate.

The second-child rule works on a different principle from the American one, too. A family with two disabled children or more is entitled to a benefit increased by 50% for each child, and Bituach Leumi's worked example takes children established at 100% and 50% and pays them at 150% and 75% respectively. The uplift still applies where the second child's benefit is not actually paid because he is in an institution, a dormitory or a foster family, or because payment stopped only when he reached 18, and Bituach Leumi says the increase is paid automatically to anyone entitled to it. ³ In the US, a second child in the household shows up inside the means test rather than in the rate: SSA makes deductions from deemed income for parents and for other children living in the home, and what is left after those deductions is what decides whether the child meets the SSI income and resource requirements. ¹⁸ Israel is not running a means test at all, so the second child produces a flat uplift on a rate that was already set.

This page prints the percentage structure and the point bands rather than a table of shekel amounts, because the amounts carry an as-of date and move. For orientation: every level is expressed as a percentage of one full allowance, which Bituach Leumi publishes as NIS 3,820 per month as of 1 January 2026, with the other four levels and the respirator and two-caregiver supplements listed on the same page as of that date. ³

Why is the most useful document in your file on foreign letterhead?

Because Bituach Leumi tries not to summon the child at all, and the file is what it reads instead. In its own words: "we are doing our best in order to make a decision based upon submitted documents only, without summoning the child to an examination by the Medical Board. Therefore, it is crucial to attach all relevant documents concerning the child's functioning, treatments administered to him, their frequency, medical exams and also, if possible, a report from the educational institution where the child is schooled." ⁶

For a lifelong Israeli that request is trivial. There is a health-fund file the family has never left and a school that has known the child for years. For a family three months off the plane, the only educational report describing more than a few weeks of the child's life is the home-country one: an IEP or 504 plan in the United States, an EHC plan in England with the other UK nations issuing their own equivalents, or the school assessment your Canadian, Australian or South African board produced. Get it before you leave, get it translated, and attach it. Bituach Leumi asks for it in one clause of one sentence, which is exactly why it is the easiest thing in the file to leave behind in another country.

The Israeli half of the file has to be built from scratch, and there is a clock on it. A new immigrant can register with a health maintenance organization (kupat cholim, קופת חולים, health fund) immediately on arrival at the bureaus of the Ministry of Integration at the airport. If you miss that, you can register through any Israel Post branch, and from three weeks after arrival, once Ministry of Interior data reaches Bituach Leumi, on the Bituach Leumi website. If registration is not performed within 90 days of the day of immigration, it can only be performed at the Bituach Leumi branch nearest your place of residence. ¹⁴ Note in passing that Bituach Leumi's English pages call the same ministry the Ministry of Integration on one page and the Ministry of Absorption on another. ¹²¹⁴ The reason to treat registration as urgent rather than administrative is what the claim later asks for: "updated medical documents regarding the child's medical and developmental condition from the last year," and a document describing the last year of a child's condition has to come from clinicians who saw the child during it. ⁵ The airport desk is the cheapest item on this list.

The claim itself is submitted by the child's parent or guardian, through the online form, by phone with a representative on *3928, as a hand-completed form uploaded through the website, or by post, fax or the service box of your local branch. Bituach Leumi asks for updated medical documents from the last year specifically so it can examine eligibility for a retroactive period of up to 12 months. ⁵ Read those two facts together and the newcomer problem is arithmetic: if you landed eight months ago, the earlier part of that twelve-month window is documented only by the foreign half of the file. If the child is hospitalised or treated in a child development centre, the claim can be submitted through that institution's social worker. Free advice and preparation for Medical Board appointments is available at Bituach Leumi's "Helping Hands" service centers. If a claim is denied you can submit a new one once six months have elapsed from the date of denial, and if the condition worsens and a medical certificate supports it there is a reexamination route. ⁵ Retroactive payment runs up to one year before the claim is submitted, depending on the medical impairment, or up to six months where the benefit is paid for developmental delay, and payment lands on the 28th of each month with shifts around holidays. ⁷ A year of retroactivity is a real amount of money to lose simply by not knowing the benefit exists.

What does the medical board actually count?

From age 3 it counts points, one score per action, taken from the functioning level that most closely fits the child, and always measured against how children of the same age function. ⁴ Nothing in an American IEP, an English EHC plan or a Canadian, Australian or South African school assessment maps onto that cleanly, because those documents describe goals, provision and progress, while the Israeli board is scoring dependency and nothing else. A child who depends on the help of others in performing everyday functions to a noticeably greater extent than children his age may be entitled from age 3, and a doctor assigns points across five domains: mobility at home, dressing and undressing, bathing, eating and drinking, and personal hygiene, each on age-banded tables. ⁴ A child already receiving the allowance for a named impairment can have his parents request a separate dependency examination to test for a higher rate. ⁴ Where the child cannot attend because of his disability, saying so on the claim form opens a request for a home examination, which the Bituach Leumi doctor approves on the strength of the attached medical documents. ⁶ At the board itself you stay with your child throughout, and no examination is performed without your consent. ⁶

Worked example. A nine-year-old, so every score comes from Bituach Leumi's age 7 to 14 column. ⁴ He moves with mobility aids but requires assistance from others with walking and standing: 1 point. He requires full assistance dressing, upper and lower body: 3 points. He requires full assistance with bathroom bathing: 3 points. He requires moderate assistance with eating and drinking: 2 points. He has no control over one sphincter day and night and is totally dependent on the assistance of others: 2 points. Total 11 points, which falls in the 10 to 12 band and produces the 188% level. Now change two lines. If the file supports only "active assistance for some bathing actions" (2 points at that age) and "eats when being served, however is unable, when hungry, to take food by himself" (1 point), the total is 9, which falls in the 8 to 9 band and produces 112%. Two rows of description move the family between two levels.

Levels and bands from Bituach Leumi's benefit-rate and dependency pages; the shekel amounts on those pages are stated as of 1 January 2026. ³⁴

Those two rows in the worked example are where a translated file does its damage. "Requires moderate assistance with eating and drinking" and "eats when being served, however is unable, when hungry, to take food by himself" are adjacent lines on the same Israeli table with a point between them, and neither is how an American IEP or an English EHC plan phrases anything. A translator working from goals and outcomes rather than from dependency will produce prose that reads as more independent than the child is. Ask whoever translates to describe what the child cannot do without help, in those terms.

One honest caveat, and it is Bituach Leumi's, not ours. The English dependency page opens its bands with a sentence about scores up to 4 points that contradicts the four bands printed immediately below it, and reads like a dropped negation. ⁴ This page publishes the bands from 5 points up and leaves the sub-5 case as a question for your branch. The English pages also carry visible translation artefacts, and Bituach Leumi's own footer says the site "contains only general information which should not be considered as a binding version of the law." ⁴ Where the English reads oddly, the binding version is the law itself, not this page or that one.

Can the allowance follow you out of Israel?

Barely, and only in three published situations, all of which require contacting Bituach Leumi before you go. The baseline is that a child receiving the allowance who leaves the country keeps it for another three months after departure, and only if the allowance had already been received for at least two months before departure. ¹⁷

Bituach Leumi repeats the same instruction in both places it lists these: "In all of these cases one must approach the National Insurance Institute prior to leaving Israel." ¹⁷ For an oleh family with grandparents in another country, that is not trivia. It is the difference between a long summer with family that costs nothing and one that stops the money.

And here is the fact that has no equivalent on the adult side. Israel has comprehensive social security conventions with 20 countries, a limited convention with Canada excluding the province of Quebec in force since 1 September 2003 which covers only the prevention of double payment of insurance contributions, and with the United States only a Friendship and Shipping Agreement which, in Bituach Leumi's words, "does not constitute an agreement in the field of social security." Crucially, the table that lists which insurance branches each comprehensive convention covers captions its disability column "Disability (not including attendance allowance and disabled child)." ¹³ So the exclusion is written into the column heading itself, before any country's row is read. Nobody carries this allowance out of Israel on a convention, whether they came from London, Toronto, Melbourne, Johannesburg, Paris or New York. The only exits are the three in the table above.

What breaks at 18, and why are there three clocks running?

Three separate things change within weeks of the birthday, and only the first of them arrives in your letterbox.

Clock one, the benefit. From January 2022 the disabled child allowance is paid until age 18 and 31 days, and Bituach Leumi sends you, on its own initiative and before the child turns 18, claims for the general disability pension and, for those who need help with everyday functions, the attendance allowance. During the transition the higher benefit is paid: if the disabled child allowance is higher it continues to age 18 and 90 days, with the adult benefit running from 18 and 91 days; if the adult benefit is higher it starts at 18 and 31 days. Bituach Leumi is emphatic that sending those claims back with updated medical documentation is what enables a timely ruling and continuous eligibility, and that a severe medical condition is handled on a fast track. ⁸ So the initiative is Bituach Leumi's and the follow-through is yours. Note also that the outer age boundary is stated two ways on Bituach Leumi's own English pages, as "18 years and three months" on the dependency page and as "18 and 31 days" on the transition page. ⁴⁸ The two would line up if the dependency page were describing the longer transition branch, but Bituach Leumi does not say so, and this page does not assume it.

Two practical notes for an oleh household. Bituach Leumi describes those adult claim forms as having been mailed to you ⁸, so the address it holds is what the handover runs on, and a family that has moved twice in three years is the household most likely to have an old one on file. Separately, Bituach Leumi's claim page publishes a route for a parent who wants to receive information about his child from Bituach Leumi on a regular basis: that parent must update another address for the minor at the Population and Absorption Authority. ⁵ The adult pension's own mechanics, its gates, its weighting and its appeal deadlines are on the disability allowance page for olim.

Clock two, legal capacity. Nothing you have been doing as the parent of a minor carries across the birthday by itself. Every arrangement the Ministry of Justice publishes for an adult has to be applied for, and each one goes to the Family Court. ¹⁰¹¹ They sit under the Legal Capacity and Guardianship Law, 5722-1962 ¹⁵, and Israeli law since 2016 has deliberately made apotroposut (אפוטרופסות, guardianship) a last resort. Amendment 18 to that law was published on 11 April 2016 and entered into force on 11 October 2016, and its governing principle is stated plainly by the Ministry of Justice: "no guardian will be appointed for a person if there are alternatives that are less restrictive of his independence," in conformity with the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. The amendment created two alternatives, an ongoing power of attorney and supported decision-making, imposed restrictions on when a guardian may be appointed and on what a guardian may do, and replaced the term "ward" with "a person for whom a guardian was appointed." ⁹¹⁵

Supported decision-making is the instrument built for exactly this reader. The Ministry of Justice describes it as "a legal arrangement and alternative to guardianship," for adults over 18 "who are capable of making decisions, but have difficulty gathering or understanding information." The application goes to the Family Court, and the published forms include an example of an application submitted by someone on the decision maker's behalf as well as one submitted by the decision maker. The court can appoint a close decision supporter (a relative or close friend), a volunteer decision supporter, or a paid one, and sets that supporter's powers. What the supporter may do reads like it was written for a household still operating in a second language: receive financial information from the bank, medical information from the HMO, and information from the National Insurance Institute, and explain it to the decision maker in a way he can understand. The limits are equally clear: decisions are made solely by the decision maker, only the decision maker can sign, and the decision maker is solely responsible for the implications of his signature. ¹⁰ The Hebrew title for the role is tomech b'kabalat hachlatot (תומך בקבלת החלטות).

If guardianship really is needed, it does not have to be total. The application goes to the Family Court, and the published service description covers an adult unable to manage "medical, personal, property, or other affairs, whether in one or more of these areas," with permanent or temporary appointments available. ¹¹ Parents arriving with a US full-guardianship or conservatorship mental model, or a UK deputyship model, routinely ask for more than the court's least-restriction principle will grant and more than the family needs. Note also that the ongoing power of attorney, which is the hero instrument on elder financial protection for olim along with the apostille problem for foreign documents, is often the wrong rung here: the Ministry of Justice describes it as an arrangement that "enables a person to plan his future and decide who will conduct his affairs and how they will be conducted" ⁹, which presupposes a young adult able to make that choice. That page carries the power-of-attorney mechanics and its timing window; this one just tells you which rung of the ladder you are standing on.

Clock three, the one nobody mentions. Children residing in Israel under 18 are automatically insured and exempt from payment of health insurance contributions. ¹² The disabled child allowance itself sits on Bituach Leumi's list of benefits exempt from health insurance contributions, so nothing was ever deducted from it. ²⁵ The under-18 exemption ends on the birthday, and the allowance it was paired with ends about a month later. From then on a person with no income from any source pays the minimum health insurance contribution, NIS 123 as of 1 January 2026 ¹², and where the young adult receives a general disability pension and has no other source of revenue that same minimum is deducted from the pension itself. ²⁵ Which adult benefit the handover produces therefore changes the answer, because the attendance allowance stays on the exempt list while the general disability pension does not. ²⁵ Two other published exemptions matter here. A person who turned 18 and will enlist in the IDF before the age of 21, or who will perform national or civil service before 21, is exempt until service begins if he has no income or income below the published threshold. ¹² And, much earlier in the timeline, a new immigrant with no income or income below that threshold is exempt from health insurance contributions for 6 months from the day of aliyah, extendable to 12 months in total where the Ministry of Absorption also pays subsistence benefits and you provide the recipient certificate, with the extra exemption granted only for the months in which those benefits were actually paid. ¹²

US citizens and green-card holders: does SSI come with you?

No. SSA's eligibility list requires that the person "is a resident of one of the 50 States, the District of Columbia, or the Northern Mariana Islands" and "is not absent from the 50 States, the District of Columbia, or the Northern Mariana Islands for a full calendar month or for 30 consecutive days or more," on top of having limited income and limited resources. ¹⁷ An oleh stops meeting the residence condition and, within a month, the absence condition too. Nothing Israel does restores it.

The mirror image is worth seeing whole, because a family that emigrated mid-childhood crosses both boundaries. In the US, while a child under 18 is unmarried and lives at home with parents who do not receive SSI, SSA may consider a portion of the parents' income and resources as if they were available to the child, which is deeming; deeming from the parent stops when the child attains age 18, marries, or no longer lives with a parent, and SSA then evaluates impairments under the adult definition of disability. ¹⁸ That American redetermination can newly qualify a young adult whose parents' income had disqualified him. In Israel there is no deeming to stop, because the three published parameters never tested family income in the first place ¹, and the 18-year event is a benefit-type handover Bituach Leumi opens on its own initiative and you complete by returning the forms. ⁸ Two countries, two re-tests at the same birthday, and the money logic runs in opposite directions.

Contributory Title II benefits are a different question and do not die the same death. Children may be eligible on a parent's retirement or disability record if unmarried and of "any age if they developed a disability at age 21 or younger," and a spouse married at least a year may be eligible if "caring for a child of any age who has a disability." ¹⁹ SSA runs a separate framework for paying Retirement, Survivors and Disability Insurance benefits outside the United States, and warns on that page that for dependants and survivors "there are additional U.S. residency requirements that may affect your right to receive Social Security payments while you are outside the United States," pointing readers at its Payments Abroad Screening Tool. ²⁰ Those conditions exist; this page does not print a rule it could not verify. Run the screening tool and get cross-border advice. Separately, Bituach Leumi records no social security agreement with the United States at all ¹³, which is covered on Bituach Leumi qualifying periods for olim.

One more US-only item. Being a US citizen does not stop mattering when the family lands: the IRS states that for a US citizen or resident alien "the rules for filing income, estate, and gift tax returns and paying estimated tax are generally the same whether you are in the United States or abroad," and that you are subject to tax on worldwide income from all sources. ²⁹ The FBAR duty runs alongside it. A US person, including a citizen, must file FinCEN Form 114 to report a financial interest in or signature or other authority over at least one financial account outside the United States if the aggregate value of those accounts exceeded $10,000 at any time during the calendar year. ²⁸ So money put in the child's name in an Israeli bank, or a US-citizen parent's signature authority over the child's Israeli account, is inside the test; and the IRS's published list of accounts you need not report is a list of account types, not a carve-out based on the account holder's age. Thresholds and mechanics are on US tax obligations for olim and FATCA and the W-9 at account opening.

UK, Canada, Australia and South Africa olim: does any of that apply to you?

No, and it is worth saying explicitly so you do not read the section above as being about you. SSI is a US programme ¹⁷, so there is no SSI cliff for a British, Canadian, Australian or South African oleh, and the worldwide-filing and FBAR duties quoted above are addressed to a US citizen or resident alien ²⁸²⁹, so they reach your household only if someone in it holds US citizenship or a green card. What is shared is that the Israeli side is identical: the same three parameters, the same evidence problem, the same 90-day health-fund clock, the same three routes abroad, and the same age-18 handover.

One deliberate gap in that table. UK DLA and PIP, the Canadian Disability Tax Credit and RDSP, the Australian Carer and Disability Support Pensions, and the South African care dependency grant are each their own question, this page verified none of them, and none of them is covered here. What each pays after you emigrate turns on that country's own residence rules, and it is worth asking before you fly rather than after.

What happens to the special needs trust you already have?

It survives the move; the reason it was built usually does not. As SSA publishes the rule, if you use your assets to establish a trust on or after 1 January 2000 the trust generally counts as your resource for SSI: wholly if revocable, and if irrevocable, to the extent of the portion from which payment could be made to you or for your benefit. The law does not apply to trusts under Section 1917(d)(4)(A) of the Social Security Act, "often called 'special needs trusts'", or to pooled trusts under Section 1917(d)(4)(C), with a further exclusion where counting the trust causes undue hardship and a warning that certain revocable (d)(4)(A) or (C) trusts may still count. ²¹ Note the scope of what SSA published: the rule it states is about a trust established with your own assets, and the page does not address a trust a parent or grandparent funded with money that was never the child's. Either way, the whole architecture exists so a disabled person can hold value without breaching a means test. That is an American design problem.

After aliyah, SSI has already stopped because it is residence-gated ¹⁷, and Israel's three published parameters for the disabled child allowance contain no income or asset test ¹. So the instrument is still standing while its central purpose has evaporated. Say that flatly, and then say the honest other side: the trust may still be doing real work the family never articulated, such as protecting a young adult who cannot manage a lump sum, keeping money outside a future guardianship account, preserving a position if the family ever returns to the US, or holding assets in a sibling-trustee structure. Unwinding is a decision, not an automatic consequence of landing. And do not overcorrect: "the Israeli child allowance is not means-tested" is not "money never matters in Israel." From 18 the adult general disability pension does test current income, which is on the disability allowance page for olim. The money question reappears at 18 in a different form.

### Israeli treatment

Israel taxes trusts partly by reference to where the settlor and the beneficiaries are resident, so an Israeli-resident beneficiary can change a trust's Israeli character without the deed, the trustee or the assets moving an inch. That mechanism, the 120-month new-resident relief and the change from 1 January 2026 under which exempt foreign income becomes reportable rather than invisible, are all set out on foreign family trusts and the oleh beneficiary and the ten-year exemption guide, and are not repeated here. The thing those pages do not say, and the reason this section exists: the trust in question was created for a disabled beneficiary, that beneficiary may be a minor or a person for whom a guardian or a decision supporter has been appointed, and trustees sitting abroad have no mechanism for learning any of that. Somebody has to tell them.

### US treatment

Mind the direction of travel on Form 3520, because it is easy to get backwards. US persons file Form 3520 to report certain transactions with foreign trusts, ownership of foreign trusts under Internal Revenue Code sections 671 through 679, and receipt of certain large gifts or bequests from certain foreign persons. ²³ The first two limbs turn on the trust being foreign, which is a technical determination rather than a question of where the lawyer's office is, so an existing American special needs trust is generally not what puts a US-citizen beneficiary into this form. The exposure runs the other way, through the third limb and through a non-US trust: when Israeli grandparents or Israeli-resident parents create an Israeli or other non-US trust for a US-citizen child, or make a large gift to him. Families do this constantly without knowing, because "we set something up for him here" sounds like housekeeping.

PFIC belongs here rather than in a footnote. Form 8621 is filed by a US person who is a direct or indirect shareholder of a passive foreign investment company, and "indirect" is the limb that reaches through a trust. The IRS lists the triggers: receiving certain direct or indirect distributions from a PFIC, recognising a gain on a direct or indirect disposition of PFIC stock, reporting a QEF or section 1296 mark-to-market election, making an election reportable in Part II, or being required to file an annual report under section 1298(f). ²² A US-citizen child who is a beneficiary of a trust holding Israeli pooled funds, or whose Israeli savings sit in a pooled vehicle, can land inside those triggers without ever having bought anything. Money set aside for a child with a disability is also money nobody intends to touch for decades. Why that long holding period is the worst case under the default PFIC computation, and what the alternatives are, is on the PFIC problem; the specific case of the government child savings account for a US-citizen child is on Gemel Yeladim and the US-citizen child.

The FBAR interacts with the trust too, and here the news is good. The IRS's published exceptions include an account that is "part of a trust of which you're a beneficiary, if a U.S. person (trust, trustee of the trust or agent of the trust) files an FBAR reporting these accounts." ²⁸ So whether a US-citizen beneficiary has his own FBAR duty for trust-held accounts turns on whether the trust side is filing. Ask the trustee, in writing, and keep the answer.

### ABLE accounts

The vehicle exists, its eligibility just widened, and whether you can use it from Israel is an open question this page will not answer for you. The ABLE Act became law on 19 December 2014, and SSA states that "prior to 1/1/2026, the ABLE disability onset had to begin before the age of 26. Effective 1/1/2026, eligibility expanded to include individuals with a disability that began before age 46." ²⁴ Qualifying routes include receiving SSI on the basis of blindness or disability that began before age 46, receiving certain disability insurance benefits, or being "the subject of a disability certification," which is the route that matters most to a family no longer receiving SSI: the certification is signed by the individual or by someone establishing the account for them and requires a copy of a physician-signed diagnosis. An eligible individual may have only one ABLE account; a person with signature authority can establish and control one for a designated beneficiary who is a minor or is otherwise incapable of managing it; contributions are typically capped at the annual ABLE contribution limit, published as $20,000 in 2026, with a separate published figure for a working beneficiary whose employer is not making certain retirement plan contributions; and SSA publishes the qualified-disability-expense list. SSA also says plainly: "We do not determine ABLE eligibility." ²⁴ Whether an Israel-resident family with no US address can open or keep an account is set by the individual programme, not by SSA, and is a question for that programme and a cross-border professional.

What does this page deliberately leave out?

Five things, each of which deserves its own treatment and none of which should be inferred from what is above. The mobility allowance and the disabled parking permit are excluded, and note the trap in the first one: entitlement to mobility benefits turns on a percentage of limited mobility due to an impairment in the legs, established by a medical committee or medical appeals committee of the Ministry of Health, not by a Bituach Leumi board, and the appeal runs to the Ministry of Health's own appeals committee and then to the regional court. ²⁷ Special-education placement, the eligibility-and-characterisation committee and Ministry of Education funding are excluded. Which therapies the health basket funds through a kupat cholim, and child-development-centre waiting times, are excluded. The adult general disability pension's own mechanics after 18 live on the disability allowance page for olim. And Israeli income-tax credit points for a parent of a child with a disability are left off entirely rather than stated thinly, because no primary source settled them for this page. Separately, the universal child allowance every family receives, kitzvat yeladim, is a separate Bituach Leumi benefit that Bituach Leumi lists separately from the disabled child allowance ²⁵, and it is covered on the child allowance page. While you are mapping the family's exposure, note that income protection and critical illness cover protect the earner rather than the child, that pre-existing conditions and private cover after aliyah is its own problem, and that beneficiary designations can override a will, which is why cross-border wills and Israeli inheritance law matter when a disabled beneficiary is involved.

Where should a newly arrived family start?

Pull three documents into one folder before anything else: the home-country school report or education plan, the last year of medical records, and the child's health-fund registration confirmation. Then take that folder to your local Bituach Leumi branch and ask the claims officer which additional documents your child's specific condition requires, and whether the file as it stands supports a decision without a board appointment. Retroactivity runs up to twelve months backwards from the day you file, depending on the medical impairment, so the folder is worth assembling this month rather than next year.

*Meidahon publishes education and comparison, not advice. Nothing here is a prediction of how any individual claim will be decided.*

Frequently asked questions

Israel's disabled child allowance turns on the parent's insured residency, not citizenship, and Bituach Leumi's three published parameters carry no income test, no asset test, no contribution record and no minimum residence period. It decides on submitted documents where it can, so the home-country medical file and school report are the evidence a newly arrived family actually has.