Szoszun Boruch Leib

Szoszun Boruch Leib received transit visa no. 1093 at the Japanese consulate in Kaunas on 5 August 1940. The register records rabbinical student - mir yeshiva, aged 31.

What the register records

Nationality as recorded

Polnisch

Age in 1940

31

Occupation

Rabbinical Student - Mir Yeshiva

Family, per the Kitade-Bluman list

wife Rischel (23)

The journey

Reached Japan; reached Shanghai; registered in Kobe for Canada.

Travelled with, and never given a number

• Rischel — wife, aged 23

The register recorded visa holders. It did not reliably record the wives and children who travelled on somebody else’s visa, so these people have no entry of their own and cannot be searched for. Where the archive has recovered a name, it is here.

Where this comes from

• List of Refugees, Vilna, 1940 — JDC Archives, New York, collection AR 33/44, file 00876. The contemporary register of Polish Jewish refugees in Lithuania, running to more than nine thousand numbered entries; the fullest independent check…
  The 1940 Vilna refugee list has, at entry 7592, Boruch Lejba Szoszusz, born 1908, who had come from Mir; the year agrees with the register's compiled age.
• 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…
  Entry 655 of the Kobe Jewish Community's refugee register: aged 33, born at Baranowicze, a yeshiva student.
• JDC Japan Emigration List — Kobe yeshivas, 1941 (Mir, Kamieniec, Slonim, Kleck, Radin, Telz, Lubavitch & others)
  1908 Baranowicze; Mir Yeshiva
• The Shanghai Ledger — register of Polish citizens kept by the Consulate of Poland in Shanghai, 1934-1943 (original at the Archives of the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, ref. 43/2003; digitised by the Library of Congress; indexed as…
  Registered with the Polish Consulate in Shanghai (ledger entry 1141); the names closely match this register line — approved by the owner's review, 19 Aug 2026 — the ledger reads: Szoszun Boruch-Lejba, student, born 1908 Baranowicze, single; registered 22 September 1941; 308 Route Cardinal Mercier; passport S-217 issued by the Shanghai consulate 19 September 1941.
• "California, San Francisco, Passenger Lists, 1893-1953", FamilySearch — index entry for Boruch L Szoszun, 1946: born about 1909, Poland. Digitised from NARA microfilm publication M1410 (passenger lists of vessels arriving at San Francisc…
  FamilySearch's index of the San Francisco passenger lists, read by the archive on 20 September 2026, has Boruch L Szoszun, born about 1909 in Poland, arriving at San Francisco in 1946 on the General M. C. Meigs. The register's compiled line gives 1909, and the two are 0 years apart, and the name occurs once on the register. The ship's manifest heading says she sailed from Shanghai, and a passenger born in Poland landing at San Francisco in 1946 from Shanghai is the route's end: the refugees who waited out the war there. So the entry is taken as this person's under the archive's rule of 19 September 2026 for records from the route. The sheet is NARA microfilm publication M1410, film 384, image 454, read by the archive on 20 September 2026.
• UNRRA China Office, S-1132-0000-0181, registration of Polish rabbis and rabbinical students, their lists and sailings, Shanghai 1945–1946 (UN Archives, AG-018-001)
  Boruch Lejb Szoszun (Shoshun) held a Canadian visa issued in Shanghai in October 1941 (No. 1261/41) and is on the UNRRA list of Polish rabbinical students who left Shanghai for Canada on the General Meigs, a list dated 5 June 1946, with his wife Rischel. Dr. Samuel Belkin of New York had asked for American visas for him so that he could teach there; on 14 June 1946 UNRRA reported that Rabbi and Mrs. Shoshun had received them and were booked on the General Meigs leaving Shanghai about 4 July, paying their own passage. His Polish passport was No. S-217/1/34/41, and in 1946 he was among the students accepted by the Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary in New York. (United Nations Archives, UNRRA China Office records.)
• Students of the Mir yeshiva in Shanghai: three lists of the students of the Rabbinical College "Mirrer Yeshiva" (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Holocaust Survivors and Victims Database, lists 48681, 48682 and 48654)
  Boruch L Szoszun is named on one of the three lists of the students of the Mir yeshiva in Shanghai indexed by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. The name occurs once on the register, and the lists are of the yeshiva that came from Vilna by way of Kobe to Shanghai in 1941, the route the register records for its students.

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