Portnoj Lajzer 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.
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… No.132, age 33, b. Brzesc, Yeshiva, arr. 24.1.
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