Jacobsohn Adolf

Jacobsohn Adolf received transit visa no. 1262 at the Japanese consulate in Kaunas on 6 August 1940. The register records rabbinical student - kamiencier yeshiva, aged 26.

What the register records

Nationality as recorded

German

Age in 1940

26

Occupation

Rabbinical Student - Kamiencier Yeshiva

The journey

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

Where this comes from

• 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 23 of the Kobe Jewish Community's refugee register: born 4 May 1914 at Berlin.
• JDC Japan Emigration List — Kobe yeshivas, 1941 (Mir, Kamieniec, Slonim, Kleck, Radin, Telz, Lubavitch & others)
  1914 Pelplin; Germany
• 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…
  Two independent Kobe records name this man and disagree about one thing. The Jewish community's refugee register at Kobe enters him as Mr Adolf Jacobsohn, born 4 May 1914 at BERLIN. The Joint Distribution Committee's list of the Kobe yeshiva students enters him as Adolf Jacobson, 1914, PELPLIN, Germany. Everything else agrees, which is why the archive treats these as one man and not two: both give 1914, both give German nationality, the register's own annotation makes him twenty-six in 1940 and a student of the Kamieniec yeshiva, and the second source is a list of exactly those students. The archive does not choose between Berlin and Pelplin, but notes which way the evidence leans. Pelplin is a small town in West Prussia and not a name a clerk would arrive at by mistake; Berlin is what a hurried entry tends to say when a birthplace is simplified or misheard. That argues for Pelplin as the birthplace and Berlin as, at most, where he was living. It is offered as a reading, not a finding, and either reading would be welcome from anyone who knows the family. The exact date — 4 May 1914 — is worth recording on its own. Very few lines on this register carry a birth date at all.
• 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. (United Nations Archives, UNRRA China Office records.)
• UNRRA China Office, S-1132-0000-0181, Mizrachi members list and the United Board of Rabbis' birth-data pages, Shanghai 1945–46 (UN Archives, AG-018-001)
  The United Board of Rabbis and Rabbinical Colleges in Shanghai listed him among its members after the war, born in 1914 in Pelplin. (United Nations Archives, UNRRA China Office records.)
• 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 Adolf Jacobsohn, rabbinical student, arrived in China in Aug 1941, wishing to go to the United States. 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 Aug 1941 is the route this line is recorded as taking.
• 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 Adolf Jacobsohn: born 1914 at Lith., a student of the Mir yeshiva, arrived in 1941 by way of Siberia; the year and the trade agree with the archive's compiled register (National Library of Israel, Historical Jewish Press).

×