Portnoj Laizer

Portnoj Laizer received transit visa no. 1099 at the Japanese consulate in Kaunas on 5 August 1940. The register records rabbi - mir yeshiva, aged 33.

What the register records

Nationality as recorded

Polnisch

Age in 1940

33

Occupation

Rabbi - Mir Yeshiva

The journey

Reached Japan; reached Shanghai; aided by the Polish ambassador Tadeusz Romer; registered in Kobe for USA.

What is known

Rabbi Eliezer Portnoy, learning of Gutwirth's success, traveled to Kovno to ask Sugihara not for one transit visa but 300 for the entire Mir Yeshiva. Sugihara agreed to grant transit visas to the group, and the roughly 300 students and rabbis of the Mir Yeshiva escaped Lithuania. They traveled twelve days across Russia on the Trans-Siberian Railroad through Vladivostok to Kobe, Japan, and later to Shanghai, where the yeshiva survived World War II intact as the only European yeshiva to do so.

A rabbi with the yeshiva, Eliezer Portnoy, knew Gutwirth o and and ask Sugihara not for one transit visa, but 300 for the whole yeshiva. In the end, he issued over 3,500 Japanese transit visas in a matter of weeks and saved even more lives than that. The world says that America is civilized. I will show the world that Japan is more civilized.

Where this comes from

• 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 132 of the Kobe Jewish Community's refugee register: aged 33, born at Brzesc, a yeshiva student, who arrived in Japan on 24 January 1941.
• JDC Japan Emigration List — Kobe yeshivas, 1941 (Mir, Kamieniec, Slonim, Kleck, Radin, Telz, Lubavitch & others)
  10 1908 Brzesc n/B Polish
• Sugihara Virtual Exhibit — Solly Ganor
  recorded elsewhere as Eliezer Portnoy, a credible spelling of this line's Portnoj Lajzer. Matched on the name alone — no date or document confirms it is the same person
• Study of the Mir Yeshiva's wartime displacement — the yeshiva's flight from Poland into Lithuania, its billeting at Keidan and Kedainiai, and its passage through Kobe to Shanghai.
  named in this history of the Mir Yeshiva's escape
• United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Holocaust Survivors and Victims Database — the Flight and Rescue electronic dataset (source 20725): USHMM's own transcription of the Kaunas register, 2,140 persons with citizenship, visa type, iss…
  USHMM Flight and Rescue dataset: arrived in Japan 24 Jan 1941 (line 1099)
• Yad Vashem Archives, Jerusalem — the card file of Jewish refugees from Poland who found refuge in various countries, 1939–1941
  Yad Vashem's card file of Jewish refugees from Poland who found refuge in various countries, 1939–1941, has a card for Eliezer Portnoj, born in 1909, of Brześć, who was in Wilno during the war; the year and the town agree with this register line. Credit: Yad Vashem Archives.
• Eric Shaffer, 'From Poland to Shanghai: The Story of the Mir Yeshiva's Survival of World War II', a fifteen-page paper, c. 2007.
• JDC Japan Emigration List — Kobe yeshivas, 1941 (Mir, Kamieniec, Slonim, Kleck, Radin, Telz, Lubavitch & others)

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