Blau Ernst Moritz

Blau Ernst Moritz received transit visa no. 1158 at the Japanese consulate in Kaunas on 5 August 1940. The register records rabbinical student - mir yeshiva, aged 28.

What the register records

Nationality as recorded

German

Age in 1940

28

Occupation

Rabbinical Student - Mir Yeshiva

Family, per the Kitade-Bluman list

wife Chaja (29)

The journey

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

Travelled with, and never given a number

• Chaja — wife, aged 29

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 7479, Ernst Moritz Blau, born 1912, 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 34 of the Kobe community's list of refugees and their relatives abroad: aged 29, born at Hamburg, German; relatives abroad: a brother-in-law, M. Chodakow, 612 Bedford Avenue, Brooklyn, New York; a cousin, Professor A. Marx, care of the Jewish Theological Seminary, New York; an uncle, Grand Rabbi Schlesiner, Libertad 785, Buenos Aires.
• 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 Polish Sugihara-stream group in wartime Shanghai
• 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)
  Ernst M Blau 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.
• Wikipedia, "Moshe Yehuda Blau", citing M. Hecht, "Champion of the Rishonim", Yated Ne'eman (US), 16 May 2003, and Gershon Tannenbaum, "Machberes", The Jewish Press, 13 June 2003
  Ernst Moritz Blau became Rabbi Chaim Moshe Yehuda Blau, for half a century a congregational rabbi in Brooklyn and the editor of some forty volumes of medieval Talmud commentaries never before printed. Born in Hamburg in October 1912 — the city and the year agree with the register's line — he studied at the Mir and, with his wife, left Lithuania on a Sugihara visa for Japan and then Shanghai, before settling in the United States. He died in 2003, according to the tributes in Yated Ne'eman of 16 May 2003 and The Jewish Press of 13 June 2003, as cited in his Wikipedia article.
• La-karov ve-la-rachok, 21 March 1946 — the Far Eastern Palestine Committee's list of Jewish refugees in Shanghai (National Library of Israel, Historical Jewish Press)
  The Far Eastern Palestine Committee's list of Jewish refugees in Shanghai, printed by the Jewish Agency Search Bureau's bulletin La-karov ve-la-rachok on 21 March 1946, lists Ernst Moritz Blau: born 1912 at Hamburg, a rabbi, arrived in 1941 from Kaunas by way of Siberia; the year, the town and the trade agree with the Kobe community's list of refugees and their relatives (National Library of Israel, Historical Jewish Press).

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