Kaplan Mowsza

Kaplan Mowsza received transit visa no. 1340 at the Japanese consulate in Kaunas on 7 August 1940. The register records rabbinical student - mir yeshiva, aged 30.

What the register records

Nationality as recorded

Polnisch

Age in 1940

30

Occupation

Rabbinical Student - Mir Yeshiva

Family, per the Kitade-Bluman list

wife Sonia (19)

The journey

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

Travelled with, and never given a number

• Sonia — wife, aged 19

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.

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…
  The Kobe Jewish Community's refugee register: aged 31, born at Jalowka, a yeshiva student, who arrived in Japan from Krakenava on 2 March 1941.
• JDC Japan Emigration List — Kobe yeshivas, 1941 (Mir, Kamieniec, Slonim, Kleck, Radin, Telz, Lubavitch & others)
  1910 Jalowka Polish
• The Shanghai Ledger — register of Polish citizens kept by the Consulate of Poland in Shanghai, 1934-1943 (original at the Archives of the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, ref. 43/2003; digitised by the Library of Congress; indexed as…
  Registered with the Polish Consulate in Shanghai (ledger entry 1142) — the consulate's register of Polish citizens who reached the city, 1934-1943 — the ledger reads: Kaplan Mowsza, born 1910 Jalowka, single; registered 22 September 1941; passport K-145 issued by the Shanghai consulate 19 September 1941.
• "California, San Francisco, Passenger Lists, 1893-1953", FamilySearch — index entry for Mowsza Kaplan, 1946: born about 1910, 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 Mowsza Kaplan, born about 1910 in Poland, arriving at San Francisco in 1946 on the General M. C. Meigs. The register's compiled line gives 1910, 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 478, 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. He is listed with his wife Sonia and a small daughter. (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 Mowsza Kaplan, rabbinical student, arrived in China in Aug 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 Aug 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)
  Mowsza Kaplan is named on one 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.
• 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 Mowsza Kaplan, born 1910, of Jałówka, who was in Wilno during the war; the year and the town agree with this register line. Credit: Yad Vashem Archives.
• 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 Mowsza Kaplan: born 1910 at Jalowka, a yeshiva student, arrived in 1941 from Vilnius; the year, the town and the trade agree with the Kobe Jewish community's refugee register (National Library of Israel, Historical Jewish Press).

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