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.
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…
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… No.198, age 24, b. Frankfurt, Student, arr 25.1
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