Palace Medical is located in the heart of Tel Aviv. It offers recovery and nursing services for the elderly and the infirm – and is the sheltered-living establishment of choice for the top 0.01 percent of Israel’s wealthiest citizens. One of the rooms in the luxury establishment has been home for some time to Leah Dankner, a childless multimillionaire who will this year celebrate her 100^th birthday. Shomrim’s attempts to speak to her and to get her response to this article were forcefully rejected by the staff at Palace Medical, who claimed that it was not possible. It is not known when Dankner moved into Palace Medical’s facility in Tel Aviv, but a relative told Shomrim that she has been there “for several years already.”

Given all of the above, two large financial transactions executed over the past 18 months by Danker have raised the eyebrows of several people who are close to her. The first was the July 2023 sale of her holdings in Dor Chemicals to the company itself. The second, as revealed by Shomrim and Calcalist, came late in the same year, when Dankner donated more than 6.5 million shekels to an NGO that advocated the Israeli resettlement of the Gaza Strip and is headed by Daniella Weiss.

Shomrim approached the few relatives who remain close to Dankner, they refused to discuss the matter in any way. The same goes for most of the attorneys and financial officers who were involved in these transactions, who claimed that professional confidentiality prevents them from doing so. Weiss, who heads the Nachala Settlement Movement that benefited from Dankner’s donation, said that she was not willing to say “a single word” on the subject.

Shomrim also approached the Office of the Custodian General in the Ministry of Justice for its comment. In its response, the office said that “after an examination of the records of the Custodian General, there is no custodianship file related to Mrs. Dankner. In light of the circumstances and concerns raised, we contacted Tel Aviv Municipality’s Welfare Department to look into Mrs. Dankner’s condition and to take whatever action it deems necessary.”

“After David’s death, the question was who would step into his shoes, especially given the huge fortune that Leah owned,” one person with knowledge of events inside the family at the time told Shomrim. “Over the ensuing years, there were many people who tried to get close to her – and it was not always done solely out of love.”

A personal fortune of hundreds of millions

Dankner, who was born in 1925, never married and has no children. She was raised in a family of six children, including three of the country’s most prominent businessmen – Shmuel, Yitzhak (the father of Nohi Dankner) and Avraham (the father of former Bank Hapoalim director Danny Dankner). In recent years, she lived in an apartment on Kikar Hamedina in central Tel Aviv, but, according to relatives, she often spent short periods of time in Palace Medical’s residential facility, which is close to her apartment, before returning home.

Some 20 years ago, Leah Dankner’s name starred in the financial sections of Israeli newspapers, mainly because of business conflicts within the Dankner family. Writing in Haaretz 20 years ago, Alon Idan described her as a rather eccentric character: “She keeps to herself, lives modestly, has an extraordinary appearance, has no connection with the rest of the family but also manages investments of millions of shekels – and almost thwarted the sale of the family’s business empire,” Idan wrote. He added that, over the years, she did not attend family events and celebrations. “Leah is distanced from the family,” one person close to the family told Idan. “For years she’s been shutting herself and avoiding them.”

In 1999, Dankner’s private fortune was estimated by the Israeli media to be around $80 million – around 360 million shekels at the time – and one source who knows the family well believes that it has grown considerably since then. According to this source, Dankner is apparently one of the two richest remaining members of the extended family. “The sum that she donated to the settlement NGO is nothing to her,” he says. The other family member who has accumulated massive wealth is her nephew, Gil Dankner, who owns Dor Chemicals.

In July 2023, five months after the death of her brother Yitzhak, Leah Dankner sold her holdings in Dor Chemicals. Her shares were bought by the company itself, which is controlled by Gil Dankner. Since Dor Chemicals is a privately owned company, no additional details about the deal are available.

The brothers helped handle her portfolio

According to relatives who spoke to Shomrim, Leah Dankner was very close to her brother, David, who died in 2014 after being injured while swimming in the open sea during a family vacation in Crete. The relatives say that Leah depended heavily on David in her business dealings, and he handled most of her large portfolio, which also once included shares in Dankner Investments, which is publicly traded on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange. Over the past two decades, her main holding – more than 20 percent – has been in Dor Chemicals.

Dor Chemicals is a private company in the petrochemical industry; it is considered highly successful and profitable. Among its many activities, it also supplies compressed hydrogen to Israeli power stations and Navy submarines, and it produces a fuel additive for oil refineries. The siblings also jointly owned another asset – an 18-dunham (4.4-acre) plot of land adjacent to Beilinson Hospital in Petah Tikvah.

“After David’s death, the question was who would step into his shoes, especially given the huge fortune that Leah owned,” one person with knowledge of events inside the family at the time told Shomrim. “Over the ensuing years, there were many people who tried to get close to her – and it was not always done solely out of love.”

The two people who were close to Leah Dankner were her brother Yitzhak, who died in February 2023 and who, according to a family member, “took upon himself the same role as David,” and her nephew Gil Dankner, David’s son, who became Leah’s business partner in some of her assets after his father’s death.

Relatives who spoke to Shomrim say that, in the years following David’s death and especially over the past decade, Leah’s connection to the family – which was never particularly close to begin with – became even more infrequent. According to one person who knows her, she has only seen a handful of relatives in recent years.

Another person who has been close to Dankner, including in the past few years, is an employee of Dor Chemicals called Shuli Lugassi, who once worked as David Dankner’s secretary and who is seen now by some members of the family as Gil Dankner’s confidante.

‘Why sell at the age of 98?’

In July 2023, five months after the death of her brother Yitzhak, Leah Dankner sold her holdings in Dor Chemicals. Her shares were bought by the company itself, which is controlled by Gil Dankner. Since Dor Chemicals is a privately owned company, no additional details about the deal are available.

The sale surprised sources who were made aware of it in real-time. Leah Dankner, one of them said, refrained from selling these shares for many years. Why sell them out of the blue at the age of 98, the source wondered.

For some relatives, it was reminiscent of the succession struggle in David Dankner’s family, which even began before his passing. In 2013, two of Gil’s sisters filed a suit against him in the Tel Aviv District Court – a suit that contained hundreds of pages – accusing their brother of trying to disinherit them from the family’s assets. The sisters claimed that, over the course of decades, their father was responsible for safeguarding their interests as stockholders in various companies. Their lawyers told the court, however, that “unfortunately, they discovered that their dear father has not been able to look out for their interests for some time, given his advanced years and the pressure exerted on him by Gil Dankner.”

The sisters argued that “Gil Dankner … behaves with Dor Chemicals as if it were his personal asset; he is exploiting and embezzling from it at an ever-increasing rate.”

In his response to the suit, Gil Dankner urged the court to dismiss the case out of hand, claiming that it was part of an illegal campaign of pressure by his sisters to force him to give in to “their extortionate and baseless demands.” He claims that the suit was filed after his parents signed a financial agreement which he said, “put an end” to their “baseless hopes of inheriting their parents’ wealth before they died.”

In the end, the case was settled out of court through mediation and an agreement was reached whereby the sisters were given some shares in the company.

‘We protected her interests’

The financial dealings and endless squabbles within the Dankner family have provided an excellent source of income for several of Israel’s top legal firms over the years. “A lot of conference rooms were built thanks to the Dankner’s money,” a lawyer employed by one of these firms quipped with Shomrim. Leah Dankner has also always been surrounded by lawyers – but almost all of them were unwilling to say a word about that sale.

When she sold her shares in Dor Chemicals, Leah Dankner was represented by the law firm of attorney Yechiel Weinroth. Unlike his colleagues, Weinroth was willing to respond to questions on the matter. “We handled a number of deals which raised a lot of money for her and, at the time that these deals were signed, we ensured, with full responsibility, that she was totally capable,” he says. “Without expanding or breaching confidentiality, I can assure you that this was done.”

Although Weinroth refused to divulge exactly what tests were carried out, there was a reference to them in a court hearing on an unrelated matter. The hearing took place in November 2023 and dealt with another of the Dankners’ assets – the plot of land in Petach Tikvah. During the hearing, the lawyer representing Dor Chemicals – which had purchased Leah Dankner’s share in the plot – said that “we need the signature of an elderly woman (…) She is in a nursing home, she’s not prepared and she’s tired,” he said, without elaborating.

As mentioned, Gil Dankner, Lugassi and Dor Chemicals declined to comment on this article.

Weiss refuses to answer any questions on the circumstances of how her organization got the donation. In a conversation with Shomrim, she said, “I don’t want to talk about it. You can ask her.” When we pointed out to Weiss that this was impossible, she replied: “I’m not the address for giving out any information.”

The donation to Gaza settlements

Over the years, Leah Dankner has donated money to various causes and Ichilov Hospital even named a garden on its grounds after her in recognition of her generosity, but her massive donation to a pro-settlement organization took relatives by surprise. Ever since the October 7 terror attacks, various right-wing organizations in Israel have been promoting the resettlement of the Gaza Strip by Jews. One of the most prominent of these groups is the Nachala Settlement Movement, under the leadership of Daniella Weiss, one of the former heads of the Gush Emunim movement. As revealed late last year by Shomrim and Calcalist, the annual report submitted by Sa’u Tziona Nes V’Degel, the official organization through which Nachala operates, shows that it received a donation of 6.68 million shekels from Leah Dankner. In an interview with Maariv in January this year, Weiss spoke about the donation without mentioning Dankner by name, saying that “the donor stipulated that the money should be used specifically for encouraging Jewish settlements in the Gaza Strip.”

Although Dankner was known within the family to be right-leaning and to support the cause of Greater Israel, no one knows how or when she came into contact with Weiss. It is possible that the two were introduced by her late brother, David Dankner, who knew Weiss. Weiss herself refuses to answer any questions on the circumstances of how her organization got the donation. In a conversation with Shomrim, she said, “I don’t want to talk about it. You can ask her.” When we pointed out to Weiss that this was impossible, she replied: “I’m not the address for giving out any information.” Nahala’s spokesperson also declined to respond to Shomrim’s questions.