Daughter Does Not Inherit When There Are Sons
6. According to the Torah, a daughter does not inherit when there are sons. I.e., if there is a son, sons, or offspring of a son or sons, the daughter or daughters do not inherit anything. This is derived from a posuk in the episode of the daughters of Tzlofchad in Parshas Pinchas (27:8): ”When a man dies and does not have a son, you shall transfer his inheritance to his daughter.” This shows that if the deceased has a son, his daughter doesn’t inherit anything (Bava Basra 110a; Choshen Mishpat 276:1).
7. Son’s son/daughter vs. a daughter. Thus, if the deceased’s son died in his lifetime, lo aleinu, the son’s son or daughter inherits their grandfather’s estate in place of their father and takes precedence over the deceased’s daughter (ibid.). If the grandfather also left behind sons, the late son’s son or daughter takes their father’s place and divides the grandfather’s estate evenly with the rest of his sons.
8. Sons, bechor, daughters. If someone left behind multiple sons, they divide the inheritance equally among themselves; the daughters get nothing. If there is a bechor, he gets twice as much as each of the other sons. E.g., if there are 4 sons, one of them a bechor, and 3 daughters, only the sons inherit. They divide the estate into 5 parts: the bechor gets 2/5, the other sons get 1/5 each, and the daughters get nothing.
“Tenth of Nechasim”
9. Although mideoraisa a daughter does not inherit, Chazal decreed that when one leaves behind one or more unmarried daughters, his sons must provide dowry money from the inheritance after subtracting the father’s debts so that their sister(s) will be able to get married (Shulchan Aruch Even HaEzer 113:6). This is called “parnassah” (Kesuvos 68a), “parnassas habas” (Tur 113), or “isur nechasim.”
10. If there are multiple unmarried daughters, the first one gets 1/10 of the estate, the next one gets 1/10 of what is left, and so forth (Shulchan Aruch ibid. 4).
11. The amount of parnassas habas depends on the father’s property at the time of his death and on an estimate of how much the father would pay to marry off his daughter (Shulchan Aruch ibid. 1), e.g., if he already married off a daughter when he was alive (ibid. 7). The estimate could be more than 1/10 the value of his property (Rema ibid. 2), or at least up to 1/10 the value of the property he left behind (Rema first opinion).
