Background
The dispute arose among owners in a shared residential building (condominium) in Jerusalem. The building’s registered bylaws contained a “rights clause” allocating all building rights — existing and future, other than rights for expanding individual apartments — as well as all roof rights (existing and those created by future construction) exclusively to the owners of the penthouse apartment. The petitioners, Feingold and Shabson, hold the penthouse rights; the respondents are owners of other units in the building. A separate District Court proceeding (Civil Case 9477-04-21) was already underway concerning, among other issues, the validity of this rights clause.
Following the construction of eight new apartments on the building’s roof under a TAMA 38 urban-renewal project, the petitioners applied on April 2, 2025 to the Jerusalem Land Registration Inspector to amend the condominium registration order, replacing the penthouse entry with the eight new units, in accordance with the rights clause. The respondents objected. On August 25, 2025, the Inspector rejected the amendment request, reasoning that the validity of the very clause underpinning it remained an open question before the District Court. The petitioners appealed to the Deputy Supervisor of Land Registration, who on November 25, 2025 partially accepted the appeal, directing that the Inspector examine the application on its merits — but recommended that the respondents first be given the opportunity to obtain a court order in the pending District Court proceedings before the registration change was finalized, so as to avoid contradictory outcomes.
The respondents then appealed the Deputy Supervisor’s decision to the Jerusalem District Court and sought a stay of its execution, arguing a risk of contradictory rulings between the court and the registrar and potential prejudice to third-party reliance on the register. The petitioners opposed, emphasizing financial harm from delayed registration of the newly built units and arguing that the respondents had not provided a personal undertaking as required. On December 18, 2025, District Court Judge A. Romanov granted the stay, finding that the balance of convenience sufficed to justify it. The petitioners then sought leave to appeal that decision to the Supreme Court.
The Court’s Holding
Justice Daphne Barak-Erez denied the request for leave to appeal. She held that the application did not satisfy the standard for granting leave under Regulation 148a of the Civil Procedure Regulations, 5779-2018. She reiterated settled doctrine that appellate intervention in decisions concerning interim relief is exercised sparingly and only in exceptional circumstances, citing Leave to Appeal 59250-04-25 Ziv Israel Ltd. v. My Town Kiryat Malachi Ltd. (August 17, 2025) and Leave to Appeal 5594-07-25 Git v. Shaferman (November 25, 2025).
On the merits of the stay decision, the Court found no flaw warranting intervention. It noted that the core issue in the substantive appeal before the District Court concerns the proper procedural track for addressing the registration freeze and which forum is competent to resolve it. Without prejudging those questions, the Court reasoned that it was sensible to leave the registration unchanged until those preliminary issues are decided — precisely to prevent what it called a “legal accident”: a situation in which the registration is amended and then a subsequent judicial ruling finds the underlying rights clause invalid, creating an irreconcilable conflict between the register and the court’s determination.
As to the petitioners’ argument that the stay should have been refused for want of a personal undertaking by the respondents, the Court accepted the respondents’ unchallenged assertion that undertakings had been filed with the District Court on December 10, 2025, the day after the stay was sought, and that notice of this had been duly given. No costs were awarded in the circumstances.
Key Takeaways
- The Supreme Court will intervene in interim-relief decisions only in exceptional cases; a straightforward balance-of-convenience determination by a district court will rarely satisfy the threshold for leave to appeal under Regulation 148a.
- Where the validity of a clause in a condominium’s registered bylaws is already contested in ongoing litigation, registration changes that depend on that clause will generally be stayed to avoid producing a “legal accident” — a registered state of affairs that a court may subsequently declare void.
- A personal undertaking requirement for a stay of execution can be satisfied by filing the undertaking contemporaneously with the stay application, even if it is not included in the application itself, provided notice is given to the court and opposing party.
- In TAMA 38 and similar urban-renewal contexts, disputes over who holds building and roof rights under registered bylaws may block registration of newly constructed units until the underlying rights question is judicially resolved.
Why It Matters
This decision reinforces the principle that the Land Registration system should not become a vehicle for pre-empting substantive disputes over property rights. Where competing forums — a civil court and an administrative registrar — could reach contradictory conclusions on the same underlying question, Israeli courts will use interim relief to hold the register in place until the legal question is settled. For practitioners advising on TAMA 38 and urban-renewal projects, the case is a pointed reminder that a contractual or bylaws-based allocation of roof and building rights is not self-executing when its validity is genuinely disputed: parties seeking to register newly built units on that basis may face delays until the dispute is conclusively resolved.
More broadly, the decision illustrates the Supreme Court’s restraint in reviewing interim-relief rulings. Petitioners who disagree with a district court’s balance-of-convenience analysis face a high bar: absent a clear legal error or an extraordinary factual circumstance, the Supreme Court will leave such decisions undisturbed, making it important for parties to present their full case on interim relief at the district court stage rather than relying on appellate correction.