Chuna Hercman

Chuna Hercman received transit visa no. 1170 at the Japanese consulate in Kaunas on 5 August 1940. The register records rabbinical student - mir yeshiva, aged 23.

What the register records

Nationality as recorded

Polnisch

Age in 1940

23

Occupation

Rabbinical Student - Mir Yeshiva

The journey

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

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 2273, Chuna Hercman, born 1916 at Husejn, who came from Miv; 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 119 of the Kobe community's list of refugees and their relatives abroad: aged 25, born at Ruzyner, a yeshiva student; relatives abroad: a friend, Samuel Chill, 71 Reekibin, Brooklyn, New York.
• 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
• JDC Archives, New York — Shanghai Migration Files, box index (AR 33/44, file 00014): the alphabetical index to the JDC's Shanghai emigration case files, 1946-1950 — some 2,640 case files covering about 5,400 persons, each family under on…
  JDC Shanghai Migration Files, case file no. 7998 — an emigration case file opened for the family in Shanghai after the war; the file itself can be requested from the JDC Archives (names closely match; approved under the owner's standing review)
• Rabbi E. Y. Hertzman, Escape to Shanghai, translated and edited by Rabbi C. U. Lipschitz (Maznaim, New York, 1981) — a Mir yeshiva student's memoir of the flight from Poland through Vilna, Kaunas, the Trans-Siberian, Kobe and Shanghai. P…
  Rabbi Elchonon Yosef Hertzman, the author of Escape to Shanghai (Maznaim, New York, 1981), is the Chuna Hercman of this entry. On the title page of his earlier account of the yeshiva's exile, Mirer yeshive in golus (Brooklyn, 1950), he signs himself Rabbi Chuna Hertzman, the name the register carries; he was a Mir student who went with the yeshiva from Keidan to Kobe and Shanghai and reached America in January 1947, and the National Library of Israel's catalogue gives his dates as 1917–2009, the birth year the register and the 1940 Vilna refugee list record for him. One point stays open: the 1940 Vilna list and the 1941 Kobe list give his home town in spellings that do not match the village in the Lublin district named in the 1950 book's dedication.
• Rabbi Chuna (Elchonon Yosef) Hertzman, Mirer yeshive in golus — the Mir yeshiva in exile (Brooklyn: the author, 1950). A 28-page Yiddish account by a student of the yeshiva of its road from Mir to Vilna, Keidan, Kobe and Shanghai, with a…
  Wrote this account, Mirer yeshive in golus (Brooklyn, 1950), signed on the title page as Rabbi Chuna Hertzman, 229 Penn Street, Brooklyn, and dated at the close 2 Iyar 5710. Its dedication names his parents, Shmuel and Tzipora Hertzman of Nisine in the Lublin district, and his brothers and sisters, and records that they died on 21 Tishrei 5701 (October 1940), in the wording used for those who perished al kiddush Hashem — the son's own memorial notice, and the only source for it here.
• "California, San Francisco, Passenger Lists, 1893-1953", FamilySearch — index entry for Chuna Hercman, 1947: born about 1918, Poland. Digitised from NARA microfilm publication M1410 (passenger lists of vessels arriving at San Francisco).…
  FamilySearch's index of the San Francisco passenger lists, read by the archive on 20 September 2026, has Chuna Hercman, born about 1918 in Poland, arriving at San Francisco in 1947 on the General M. C. Meigs. The register's compiled line gives 1917, and the two are 1 year 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 1947 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 387, image 718, 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)
  UNRRA's China Office registered him in Shanghai in 1946 among the Polish rabbis and rabbinical students; he had arrived in China in August 1941 and wished to go on to Palestine. (United Nations Archives, UNRRA China Office records.)
• The JDC's Shanghai migration files, 1946–1950 — the index of emigrants from Shanghai (JDC Archives, New York, collection AR 33/44, file 14)
  The JDC's index of its Shanghai emigration cases lists a Chana Hercman leaving for the United States; whether this is Chuna Hercman of the Mir yeshiva, with his name mistyped, is not settled. (JDC Archives, New York, AR 33/44, the Shanghai migration index)
• 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)
  Chuna Hercman 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.
• La-karov ve-la-rachok, 31 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 31 March 1946, lists Chuna Hercman: born 1916 at Husynne, a student of the Mir yeshiva, arrived in 1941 from Wilna; the year and the town agree with the 1940 Vilna refugee list, the Kobe community's list of refugees and their relatives (National Library of Israel, Historical Jewish Press).

×