Zupnik Moses

Zupnik Moses received transit visa no. 1225 at the Japanese consulate in Kaunas on 6 August 1940. The register records rabbinical student - mir yeshiva, aged 22.

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What the register records

Nationality as recorded

Polnisch

Age in 1940

22

Occupation

Rabbinical Student - Mir Yeshiva

The journey

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

What is known

This document is a 'Special Pass For Rabbi Student' issued in Shanghai to Moses Zupnik, a Polish national aged 28, residing at 230 Liaoyang Rd. The pass granted him special permission to travel to No. 493 JanSan Rd. from the designated (stateless refugee) area between 7 A.M. and 11 P.M. Zupnik, a yeshiva student, was among the Jewish refugees who reached Shanghai during the war.

Moshe Zupnik, a student of the Mir Yeshiva which had fled from Poland to Lithuania, approached Sugihara's secretary Wolfgang Gudze to seek visas for the yeshiva's 300 students and teachers stranded in Kaunas. He kept up his vigil at the Japanese consulate for two weeks. Sugihara let him use the consulate stamp to help produce the transit visas, and the group travelled out through Japan on paper naming Curaçao. The Mir Yeshiva survived the war intact. Zupnik later asked Sugihara why he had risked his career for strangers; Sugihara answered that he had pity on them.

When the Mir Yeshiva needed three hundred visas, Reb Leib Malin chose Moshe Zupnik — a German-raised twenty-two-year-old with fluent German and one borrowed presentable suit — to get them. Turned away once, he bribed the Polish doorman with Yaakov Ederman, was told by secretary Wolfgang Gudze that an entire community was impossible, and asked to see the consul himself. Sugihara pressed him — "It's wartime. How will you get money and ships?" — and then said yes. Zupnik spent the next two weeks inside the consulate stamping visas beside Gudze, one of the strangest and most consequential partnerships of the rescue. He learned beside Rav Chatzkel Levenstein through the Shanghai years and died…

Special Pass For Rabbi Student Name ZUPNIK Moses F.N. Polish Age 28 Address 230 Liaoyang Rd/ Special permition is given to the above person to go to No. 493 JanSan RD. from the designated area.

I am a member of the Mir Yeshiva. I have three hundred passports with me. We will go to Curacao. Help us to get there. He simply handed over the consulate stamp and allowed me to make visas!

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 7497, Mozes Zupnik, born 1917, who had come from Mir; the year agrees with the register's compiled age.
• 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 198 of the Kobe Jewish Community's refugee register: aged 24, born at Frankfurt, a student, who arrived in Japan on 25 January 1941.
• 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
• 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 25 Jan 1941 (line 1225)
• 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. 19, he is the student the yeshiva sent to the Japanese consul at Kaunas: one student of the yeshiva, HaRav Moshe Zupnik, went in to him and explained our situation, Hertzman writes, after which the whole yeshiva received Japanese transit visas.
• "California, San Francisco, Passenger Lists, 1893-1953", FamilySearch — index entry for Moses Zupnik, 1946: 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 Moses Zupnik, born about 1918 in Poland, arriving at San Francisco in 1946 on the General M. C. Meigs. The register's compiled line gives 1918, and the two are 0 years 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 1946 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 384, image 450, 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, as a rabbinical student who wished to go on to Palestine. He was one of the fifty rabbinical students holding Canadian visas issued in Tokyo in September 1941 (visa No. 540). (United Nations Archives, UNRRA China Office records.)
• The 1950 United States census (US National Archives, 1950census.archives.gov)
  In April 1950 the United States census found him in Brooklyn, aged 32, born in Germany, a Hebrew teacher, with his wife and children (National Archives, 1950 census, enumeration district 24-510, sheet 5).
• Polish rabbis and rabbinical students registered with UNRRA, Shanghai (United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, China Office;… — United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Holocaust Survivors and Victims Database, list 48676
  The United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration's Shanghai register of Polish rabbis and rabbinical students, indexed by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, has Moses Zupnik, rabbinical student, arrived in China in 1941, wishing to go to Palestine. The name occurs once on the register; the list is of the refugees who came from Vilna by way of Kobe, and an arrival in Shanghai in 1941 is the route this line is recorded as taking.
• 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)
  Moses Zupnik 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. This is the only line on the register with this given name and surname, 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.
• A Special Pass for Rabbi Student issued in Shanghai to Moses Zupnik (No. 1225), Polish, aged 28, of 230 Liaoyang Road, No. 236, 1945, with his photograph.
• Chiune Sugihara - Wikipedia
• Collections Search - United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
• Sugihara Virtual Exhibit — Solly Ganor

and 4 further records, shown on the full entry.

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