Szapiro Mejer received transit visa no. 1054 at the Japanese consulate in Kaunas on 5 August 1940. The register records rabbi - lublin yeshiva, aged 23.
What the register records
Nationality as recorded
Polnisch
Age in 1940
23
Occupation
Rabbi - Lublin Yeshiva
Family, per the Kitade-Bluman list
husband of #796
The journey
Reached Japan; reached Shanghai; registered in Kobe for USA.
What is known
At twenty-three, handed the yeshiva's remaining cash — "Meier, take over the command" — he walked twenty boys east out of burning Lublin by night, and crossed the Bug on Rosh Hashanah 1939 behind a stranger who appeared at the bank, asked two zlotys a head, waded them across single file, and melted back into the dark. In Vilna he helped re-found his yeshiva from ten starving boys. When the Curaçao route opened, the money for visas sat with the Amshenover Rebbe, who would not release it for food; when the visas came, he said the sentence the family kept: "Take the visas. If you are hungry you will be hungry again." Blocked from the dollar fare, Meier bought a ruble ticket in Riga, crossed… At twenty-three, handed the yeshiva's remaining cash — "Meier, take over the command" — he walked twenty boys east out of burning Lublin by night, and crossed the Bug on Rosh Hashanah 1939 behind a stranger who appeared at the bank, asked two zlotys a head, waded them across single file, and melted back into the dark. In Vilna he helped re-found his yeshiva from ten starving boys. When the Curaçao route opened, the money for visas sat with the Amshenover Rebbe, who would not release it for food; when the visas came, he said the sentence the family kept: "Take the visas. If you are hungry you will be hungry again." Blocked from the dollar fare, Meier bought a ruble ticket in Riga, crossed Siberia in February 1941, and sailed from Vladivostok on a boat ticket telegraphed for another Shapiro entirely. Kobe, then Shanghai: the ghetto years as "Meier the Doctor," giving injections the trembling Dr. Seligson could not; the day he waited in an anteroom while the Amshinover Rebbe asked the Swedish delegation to intercede for Polish Jewry, and the answer came back that Sweden could not dictate to Germany. He left Shanghai in 1946 as a fictitious bus-boy on a Swedish freighter and finished the journey at Torah Vodaas in Brooklyn. Recorded by his family in 2007; provided by his daughter Millie Levy.
The Kobe relatives list — refugees at Kobe in 1941 recorded with their relatives abroad. Seventy-six pages in numbered sheets (LIST No. 7, No. 16 and others), each line giving a name, age, birthplace, occupation and citizenship, and then… 251, 1916 Dobrzyn; uncle Fuks Rio de Janeiro, cousin Moses Coven New York
The JEWCOM register — the refugee register kept by the Refugee Committee of the Jewish Community of Kobe (Ashkenazim) at No. 6 Yamamoto-dori, 1-chome, whose cable address was 'JEWCOM Kobe'. Eighty-four pages on the committee's own printe… #630, age 25, b. Dobrzyn, rabbi, arr. 25.2, from Vilno
Henry Shapiro memoir — three chapters recorded September-October 2007 (Chaim Meir Yechiel Szapiro, b. 18 Sep 1916 Dobrzyń on the Vistula; Yeshivas Chachmei Lublin), provided by his daughter Millie Levy, August 2026. Full text preserved i…