A Lawyer's Licence, a Forged Stamp and a Mortgage on Someone Else's Home: The Gerbartzik Judgment

The fourteen documents

The court found that over a period of about three months the defendant forged no fewer than 14 documents, all of them needed to carry out the plan. This was not one signature on one page. It was a complete set of confirmations built to pass the bank's checks.

According to the facts of the amended indictment, these are the documents submitted to the bank:

1. A forged sale contract for the apartment, carrying forged signatures of the owners and stating that it had been drawn up by another lawyer without his knowledge
2. A forged document presented as a Civil Administration confirmation that the defendant and his wife owned the apartment
3. A forged document presented as a Civil Administration confirmation that no third party rights encumbered the apartment
4. A forged rights confirmation in the name of counsel for the housing company, stating that no third party rights encumbered the apartment
5. A second forged rights confirmation, stating that the defendant and his wife owned the apartment and that an undertaking had been given to register a mortgage in the bank's favour for 1,880,000 shekels
6. A pledge notice to the Corporations Authority including a lawyer's signature verification, where the lawyer's signature was forged and the forged stamp applied
7. A forged irrevocable power of attorney in the bank's favour, carrying forged signatures of the owners and of the lawyer
8. A forged letter of undertaking by the defendant and his wife to the bank
9. A forged lawyer's confirmation to the bank regarding the transfer of rights and registration of the pledge
10. A forged mortgage affidavit of the defendant and his wife
11. A forged confirmation by the housing company regarding an undertaking to register a mortgage
12. A forged signature verification, in which counsel for the housing company's signature was forged
13. A forged bank confirmation stating that an account whose details appeared on it, and which belonged to the businessman, was held in the owners' names
14. Copies of the owners' identity cards, which he held because he served as their mortgage adviser

Two further documents appear in the judgment outside that list. On 16 January 2022 an online Tax Authority form was passed to the bank declaring that the defendant was the buyer, a form that was never actually filed with the Tax Authority. And after the owners discovered the mortgage, the second sale contract concerning the Ashdod apartment was forged.

On 28 February 2022 the defendant visited the apartment with a valuer who was to prepare an opinion for the bank. He told the valuer he intended to buy the apartment. He told the owners that the valuer had come as part of the refinancing process. One visit, one apartment, two accounts.

The money

The money did not stay with the defendant. According to the judgment, the 1,880,000 shekels were transferred from the bank to the businessman's account, in line with the details on the forged account confirmation. The money laundering offence of which he was convicted concerns the concealment of the origin of that sum.

After the affair came to light, he paid it back. Under the plea agreement it was agreed that the defence would argue that the mortgage funds were returned within the two months following the filing of the police complaint, and that the owners were compensated. Defence counsel stressed that the repayment and the compensation were made before the defendant was first questioned by the police.

The court gave real weight to the fact that the circumstances and the documents produced by the defence showed that he did not intend to leave the victims ruined and did not intend to take ownership of their apartment. It held, however, that this did not cure the damage to public confidence, nor remove the serious risk he created for the bank and for the owners even if he believed he would be able to repay the loan.

What the court said about the lawyer's licence

In this affair the defendant was not acting as anyone's lawyer. He acted as a mortgage adviser, and as a pretended buyer. Even so, a central part of the judgment deals precisely with the lawyer's licence he held.

"Loyalty and integrity are required to light a lawyer's path."

The court explained why. It is the lawyer's professionalism, expertise and duty of loyalty that allow the public at large to place its trust in him, including in matters of great consequence. Real estate transactions, the judgment states, are completed because every party involved, the seller, the buyer, the financing body and the rights registries, relies on a considerable number of confirmations issued by a lawyer.

That is exactly where the gravity lies. The documents forged in this affair are the documents the system relies on: a lawyer's confirmation, a signature verification, an irrevocable power of attorney, a rights confirmation. From his legal education the defendant knew what those documents look like and what weight they carry.

"Despite his legal education and despite the lawyer's licence granted to him, he did not hesitate to forge another lawyer's stamp, and to make false use of it and of other lawyers' names time after time."

The court added that this was not an instinctive, random or one-off lapse but planned and sustained conduct, and that the defendant did not hesitate to use information and documents that had reached him from clients to whom he provided a service as a mortgage adviser.

Suspension from the Bar, and what comes next

The disciplinary process began before the sentence. Among the documents the defence produced at the sentencing stage was a decision of the district disciplinary tribunal of the Israel Bar Association dated 28 April 2024, temporarily suspending his membership of the Bar until judgment was given in the criminal proceeding.

This is the point to separate two tracks that run in parallel under different rules. The criminal track ended with a sentence. The disciplinary track, which determines the fate of the lawyer's licence, runs in the Bar's own tribunals and does not depend on the criminal sentence.

These are the tools the Bar Association Law provides at this stage:

The practical meaning is this. A criminal conviction does not revoke a lawyer's licence automatically. It opens the door to an application asking the disciplinary tribunal to find that the offence involved moral turpitude and to impose one of the section 68 penalties, up to removal from the Bar. Without such a decision, a temporary suspension remains exactly what it says it is: temporary.

In the material reviewed for this article, no decision of the disciplinary tribunal in his case given after the sentence was located, and no publication on the current status of his licence was located. That is not proof that no such decision exists.

Mortgage advisers: a profession without a licence

There is a side to this affair that touches everyone who has taken a mortgage in Israel, even people who never met a lawyer convicted of fraud. The defendant met the owners not as a lawyer but as a mortgage adviser. In that role he received their identity cards, their rights documents and the whole file. And it was that role that created the opportunity to commit the offences.

The court addressed the gap. The judgment states that although the occupation of mortgage advice has not yet been regulated by legislation, the clients of a mortgage adviser place their trust in him and disclose a great deal of information and documents to him, in full confidence that they will be used for their benefit and only for the purpose for which they were given, and certainly not in order to harm them and their rights.

The court further noted that a bill is before the Knesset for first reading whose purposes include imposing professional duties on mortgage advisers to ensure that they act for the client's benefit and to prevent them from preferring their own interests over the client's. The reference is to the draft Regulation of the Occupation of Mortgage Advice Law, 5786-2026.

In the meantime the position is this. A lawyer's licence can be checked in the Bar's register. A mortgage adviser cannot be checked anywhere. No licence, no register, no list of suspensions. This affair shows what can be done with a client's file without the system noticing.

The sentence

The gap between the parties was wide. The prosecution argued that the appropriate sentencing range ran from 24 to 48 months of actual imprisonment and asked for 24 months, together with a suspended sentence, a fine, compensation and forfeiture. The defence argued that the lower end of the range stood at a few months to be served as community service, and asked for community service, a probation order and further compensation.

The probation service recommended imprisonment served as community service, a suspended sentence, a fine, an undertaking and an 18 month probation order, or alternatively the shortest possible custodial term. Counted in the defendant's favour were his clean criminal record, his early guilty plea, the steps he took to repair the consequences of the offence, his personal and family circumstances and the long period that had passed.

The court set a range of 12 to 30 months of actual imprisonment and held that the appropriate sentence lay at the bottom of that range. It declined, however, to depart from the range on rehabilitation grounds:

"A rehabilitative process is not a magic phrase that automatically entitles whoever invokes it to a lighter sentence."

The sentence imposed was twelve months of actual imprisonment, a suspended sentence of eight months for three years from the date of release, compensation of 10,000 shekels to the victims and forfeiture of 200,000 shekels. A right of appeal to the Supreme Court was set within 45 days.

How to check a lawyer's licence

A licence check would not have prevented this affair, because his licence was valid at the time of the acts. What the affair does show is exactly which documents carry the weight in a transaction, and what is worth verifying:

1. Check the lawyer's licence. Search the name and licence number in the lawyer search on the Israel Bar Association website and cross-check against the list of suspended lawyers. Check on the day, not from an old document.
2. Verify with whoever issued the document. A rights confirmation, a housing company confirmation and a bank confirmation all have an issuer. You can call the issuer and ask whether the document came from them.
3. A stamp is not a verification. A lawyer's stamp is a piece of rubber. If a lawyer's signature appears on a document in your transaction, you can contact that lawyer directly and confirm that he signed it.
4. Ask who is asking. Copies of identity cards and rights documents handed to an adviser stay with him. Hand over the minimum required, and ask why each document is needed.
5. Open letters from the bank. In this affair it was the bank's letter to the owners that exposed the transaction. Notice of a mortgage registration or a change of ownership is not something that waits.
6. Pull the registry extract. You can obtain an official extract of the rights in the property and see who is registered as the rights holder and which charges are recorded.
7. Complaints. A complaint about a lawyer's conduct goes to the ethics committee of the district in which he is registered. Where a criminal offence is suspected, a complaint also goes to the police. For a mortgage adviser, who holds no licence, there is at present no equivalent disciplinary body.

Timeline

What is still unknown

This article rests on the judgment in criminal case 4998-12-24. No further documents from the file were located, which leaves several matters open.

No publication on the current status of his lawyer's licence was located, and no decision of the disciplinary tribunal given after the sentence was located. No information was found on an appeal to the Supreme Court, for which the judgment set a 45 day period, and none on any stay of execution. Whether he reported to serve the sentence on the date set was not checked or verified.

The names of the victims are not published here, nor is the name of the businessman whose account received the money, who is not a defendant in the proceeding and to whom no offence was attributed. The full name of the lawyer whose stamp was forged does not appear in the judgment.