Chaim Lejba Szmulewicz

Chaim Lejba Szmulewicz received transit visa no. 1205 at the Japanese consulate in Kaunas on 6 August 1940. The register records rabbi - mir yeshiva, aged 37.

What the register records

Nationality as recorded

Polnisch

Age in 1940

37

Occupation

Rabbi - Mir Yeshiva

Family, per the Kitade-Bluman list

husband of #1203, children (Edel (9), Rafael (3), Rywka (5))

The journey

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

Travelled with, and never given a number

• Edel — child, aged 9
• Rafael — child, aged 3
• Rywka — child, aged 5

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.

What is known

The Sznulewicz family, Polish citizens from the Mir/Stuczyn region, appear together as entries 1-5 on a Mirer Yeshivah relief list (List #10) compiled while refugees were sheltering in Kobe, Japan after fleeing eastward, likely with transit visas issued in Kaunas.

MIRER YESIVAH List # 10

Where this comes from

• 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…
  Entries 240 to 243 of the Kobe community's list of refugees and their relatives abroad: with family, born 1903 at Szczuczyn; a friend abroad: Rabbi Kalmanowicz, 540 Betford Avenue, Brooklyn.
• 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 648 of the Kobe Jewish Community's refugee register: aged 38, born at Szczuczyn, a rabbi, who arrived in Japan on 13 February 1941.
• JDC Japan Emigration List — Kobe yeshivas, 1941 (Mir, Kamieniec, Slonim, Kleck, Radin, Telz, Lubavitch & others)
  1 1903 Stuczyn Polish
• 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 13 Feb 1941 (line 1205)
• 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…
  In Rabbi Elchonon Yosef Hertzman's memoir Escape to Shanghai (Maznaim, New York, 1981), pp. 54–55, Rabbi Chaim Shmulewitz, the rosh yeshiva, lectures at Kobe, where the yeshiva took up tractate Kiddushin, and writes to America in 1941 on the yeshiva's situation, a letter printed in Hapardes that year.
• 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…
  In Rabbi Chuna (Elchonon Yosef) Hertzman's Mirer yeshive in golus (Brooklyn, 1950), p. 28, he is named in the closing thanks as one of the yeshiva's heads, Rabbeinu HaGaon R. Chaim Shmulewitz, by then in Jerusalem.
• Hapardes (Chicago), year 15, no. 4, Tammuz 5701 (July 1941), 52 pp. — Rabbi Avraham Kalmanowitz, "Hatzalat yeshivat Mir — kiyumah u-vinyanah" (The rescue of the Mir yeshiva, its survival and its rebuilding), pp. 6–8, written in America a…
  Rabbi Avraham Kalmanowitz's article in Hapardes, year 15, no. 4, Tammuz 5701 (July 1941), pp. 6–8, written in America from the accounts of rabbis newly arrived from Japan, describes the Mir yeshiva as it stood at Kobe that summer under its heads and its mashgiach; the passage on the yeshiva's house at Kobe is the one Hertzman quotes in English in Escape to Shanghai, p. 55.
• United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Photograph 21567: students and teachers of the exiled Mir yeshiva studying in the sanctuary of the Beth Aharon synagogue, 50 Museum Road, Shanghai, 1941; commissioned, the record says, by Rabbi Ka…
  The Museum's caption for Photograph 21567 of the Mir yeshiva in the Beth Aharon synagogue, Shanghai, 1941, names him as the acting dean, second from the right in the front row; the Museum's Photograph 40211 repeats the identification from that record. Whether the naming came with the photograph or was made later from the published accounts of the yeshiva is not stated in the record, and the archive has asked; until it knows, the caption is recorded beside the identification made from the Kobe forms and the Mirrer Yeshiva Association's list, not as an independent confirmation of it.
• 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 Chaim Lejb Szmuelowicz, born in 1903, of Mir, who was in Wilno during the war; the year and both his given names agree with this register line. Credit: Yad Vashem Archives.
• JDC Japan Emigration List — Kobe yeshivas, 1941 (Mir, Kamieniec, Slonim, Kleck, Radin, Telz, Lubavitch & others)

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