The Jerusalem District Court has rejected an appeal by a ground-floor apartment owner in the Bayit Vegan neighborhood, ruling that she and her family had annexed large areas belonging to all of the building's residents and must vacate them.
Jerusalem Neighbor Dispute Ruling
Court Orders Family to Vacate Shared Space
A ground-floor resident in the chareidi neighborhood of Bayit Vegan had turned a bomb shelter, a boiler room and a large garden into part of her home.
Judge Tamar Bar-Asher upheld an eviction order issued by the lower court and ordered the appellant, Avigail Esther Inbi, to pay NIS 29,000 in legal costs.
The dispute began in 2020, when Feiga Perlov Kanovsky, who owns a first-floor apartment in the building, sued to evict the Inbi family from common areas that had effectively become part of their ground-floor home. She argued that she and the other residents had been denied any use of those spaces.
The proceedings revealed how much space had been taken. A 20-square-meter shared bomb shelter had been converted into a private office. The boiler room and water cistern had been turned into a self-contained residential unit with two rooms, a kitchen and a shower. The family had also taken over a 260-square-meter garden, a 70-square-meter yard and parking space for three vehicles.
The Magistrate's Court found that the defendants had blocked access to the common areas, paved over parts of them and built a room connected directly to their apartment. The apartment is listed in the Land Registry at only 37 square meters, but since 2019 its size for municipal property tax purposes has stood at 165 square meters.
In her appeal, Inbi argued that the family had used the spaces for years without objection from the neighbors, which she said amounted to implied consent and gave them permission to hold on to them. She also said the family had invested heavily in developing and improving the areas, and that the Magistrate's Court had failed to consider their reliance on the existing situation.
Bar-Asher reviewed the evidence, including a 2008 document presented as proof of consent, and found that no authorization for exclusive use of the shared property had been shown to come from the building's rights holders. "The passive stance of the neighbors cannot create property rights out of nothing," she wrote.
On the family's investment in the property, the judge wrote, "They have only themselves to blame in this matter." She added that permission to use real estate can, as a rule, be revoked.
The appeal was summarily dismissed without the respondent being required to file a response. The eviction order and the ban on making changes to the common property remain fully in force.
According to Kikar HaShabbat, the ruling is one of a series of decisions in neighbor disputes holding that long-term use of shared property does not create ownership rights, and that residents who want to change the use of common areas must obtain explicit consent from all of the building's rights holders.
