Steinfeld Wilhelm

Steinfeld Wilhelm received transit visa no. 1110 at the Japanese consulate in Kaunas on 5 August 1940. The register records mir yeshiva, aged 25.

Documents

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What the register records

Nationality as recorded

German

Age in 1940

25

Occupation

Mir Yeshiva

Family, per the Kitade-Bluman list

wife Chana (20)

The journey

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

Travelled with, and never given a number

• Chana Steinfeld, née Kovenski — wife, aged 26, though the ledger says 20, born Mir, 1914

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 7583, Wilhelm Steinfeld, born 1915, who had come from Mir; the year agrees with the register's compiled age.
• 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…
  Entry 314 of the Kobe community's list of refugees and their relatives abroad: aged 26, born at Vienna, a yeshiva student, German.
• United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Holocaust Survivors and Victims Database — 'List of Polish war refugees in China', 242 names: the Polish (Sugihara-stream) group in wartime Shanghai, among them Gedalia Zupnik of the Mir, Chaim Ba…
  USHMM 'List of Polish war refugees in China' (242 names); the names closely match this register line — approved by the owner's review, 19 Aug 2026
• Marriage record, Vilnius, 2 April 1940 — record no. 93, Lithuanian State Archive LVIA/1817/1/444, indexed in the LitvakSIG All Lithuania Database (Lithuania Marriages and Divorces). Sent to the archive by Yehuda Rubin, grandson of the co…
  They married in Vilnius on 2 APRIL 1940 — four months before Sugihara wrote the visa, and already as refugees. The record turns eleven words of register into a family. WILHELM was born on 31 March 1915 IN VIENNA, a citizen of Germany, and the registrar wrote him down as a rabbinic seminary student; his parents were Julius Steinfeld and Gizelia Adler. His place is given as KEDAINIAI, which is where part of the Mir Yeshiva was billeted after it fled Poland — so the compiled register's bare note “Mir Yeshiva” and this record agree. CHANA was born on 12 AUGUST 1914 at MIR, a former citizen of Poland, daughter of Abram Jankel Kovienski and Basia Kantorovic. The rabbi was Joselis Rozovskis; the witnesses Izaokas Vainsteinas and Dovydas Chazanovicius. ONE THING DOES NOT AGREE, and the archive states it rather than tidying it away. The register's family note calls her “wife Chana (20)”. This record gives her birth as 12 August 1914, which made her twenty-five when the visa was written on 5 August 1940 — she turned twenty-six a week later. A contemporary civil register is the better evidence, so her age here is 25, and the ledger's “20” is recorded as what it is: a figure we cannot recon… A contemporary civil register is the better evidence, so her age here is 25, and the ledger's “20” is recorded as what it is: a figure we cannot reconcile.
• Naturalization records of Chana Steinfeld and of Wilhelm Steinfeld, U.S. Dis… — the second recording it as 'Mir Powiat-Stolpce, Poland', which fixes the place in Stolpce county. Identified for the archive by Moishe Miller, 28 August 2026.
  Two United States naturalization records, filed independently of one another and of the Lithuanian civil register, both give 12 August 1914 as Chana's date of birth. With the Vilnius marriage record of 2 April 1940 that makes three sources in agreement, and settles the age: she was twenty-five when the visa was written on 5 August 1940, not the twenty the compiled register gives. The husband's own naturalization file states his wife's birth in the same terms, so the two are not copies of one another.
• List or Manifest of Alien Passengers for the United States, sheet 35 of the S.S. GENERAL M. C. MEIGS, sailing from Shanghai, China, on 4 January 1947 — the left half of the sheet, columns 1 to 15. Thirty lines, almost all of them refugee…
  Line 10 of sheet 35: STEINFELD Wilhelm, 31, male, rabbi, stateless, race Hebrew, born Austria, Vienna; and on line 11 his wife Chana, 32, born Poland, Mir. The identification does not rest on the name. This register line is entered as German, and the Kobe committee's own register gives this man as 26 years old, born at Vienna, a yeshiva student, German - so a birth year of about 1915. The marriage register at Vilnius gives Vilhelm Steinfeld, born at Vienna on 31 March 1915, a citizen of Germany and a student of the rabbinical seminary. The manifest agrees with all of it: age 31 in January 1947, born at Vienna, and by then a rabbi. Four agreements beyond the name - birth year, birthplace, citizenship as it was before the war, and calling.
• The original page of the Vilnius Jewish marriage register carrying entry No. 93 of 1940 — the page itself, photographed at high resolution, of which the archive previously held only the indexed abstract. The register is ruled in Lithuani…
  The original page of the Vilnius marriage register, entry 93 of 2 April 1940, of which the archive held the index abstract. It gives the groom as born at VIENNA on 31 March 1915 and a CITIZEN OF GERMANY, living at Kedainiai, a student of the rabbinical seminary - which is why this register line reads German, and which agrees with the Kobe committee's entry of 26 years old, Vienna, yeshiva, German. The page also corrects the index, which put Kedainiai and Vilnius in the birthplace column: those were the places the couple were living. He married Chana Kovienska, born at Mir on 12 August 1914, four months before the transit visa was written at Kaunas.
• The right half of sheet 35 of the S.S. GENERAL M. C. MEIGS manifest, columns 16 to 37, headed for the immigrant inspector at the port of arrival: San Francisco, California, 16 January 1947. It gives for each of the thirty passengers the…
  The other half of the arrival sheet already on this entry: the columns naming, for each passenger, the nearest relative left behind and the place they were going to. Given by Moishe Miller.
• The 1950 United States census (US National Archives, 1950census.archives.gov)
  In April 1950 the United States census found him in Queens, New York, aged 35, born in Austria, with his wife Chana and their six children — the eldest born in Japan, three in China and the youngest two in New York (National Archives, 1950 census, enumeration district 41-2145A, sheets 25–26).
• 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)
  Wilhelm Steinfeld is named on two 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.
• List or Manifest of Alien Passengers for the United States, sheet 35 of the S.S. GENERAL M. C. MEIGS, sailing from Shanghai, China, on 4 January 1947 — the left half of the sheet, columns 1 to 15. Thirty lines, almost all of them refugee…
• The right half of sheet 35 of the S.S. GENERAL M. C. MEIGS manifest, columns 16 to 37, headed for the immigrant inspector at the port of arrival: San Francisco, California, 16 January 1947. It gives for each of the thirty passengers the…

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