Kramer Lejb

Kramer Lejb received transit visa no. 1368 at the Japanese consulate in Kaunas on 7 August 1940. The register records rabbinical student - lubavitsch yeshiva, aged 22.

What the register records

Nationality as recorded

Polnisch

Age in 1940

22

Occupation

Rabbinical Student - Lubavitsch Yeshiva

The journey

Reached Japan; reached Shanghai; aided by the Polish ambassador Tadeusz Romer; registered in Kobe for Canada.

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…
  Entry 160 of the Kobe community's list of refugees and their relatives abroad: aged 23, born at Chelm, Polish; relatives abroad: a friend, Rabbi Shneyerson, 770 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn, New York.
• "California, San Francisco, Passenger Lists, 1893-1953", FamilySearch — index entry for Lejb Kramer, 1941: born about 1918, Poland. Digitised from NARA microfilm publication M1410 (passenger lists of vessels arriving at San Francisco). R…
  FamilySearch's index of the San Francisco passenger lists, read by the archive on 20 September 2026, has Lejb Kramer, born about 1918 in Poland, arriving at San Francisco in 1941. The register's compiled line gives 1918, and the two agree. The name occurs once on the register, and a Polish-born passenger landing at San Francisco in 1941 fits the route through Japan, so the entry is taken as this person's under the archive's rule of 19 September 2026 for records from the route.
• The Australian Jewish News (Melbourne), 29 July 1977 (National Library of Israel, Historical Jewish Press)
  Lejb Kramer, a Lubavitch yeshiva student, reached Canada. The Australian Jewish News of Melbourne, 29 July 1977, interviewed Rabbi Leib Kramer, head of the Rabbinical College of Canada, on a visit to Melbourne. He said he came to Montreal in 1941 as one of eighty scholars to whom the Canadian government granted visas, that he had left Vilna with a ten-day transit visa for Japan, and that on the instruction of the previous Lubavitcher Rebbe he founded a yeshiva in Montreal. The archive attaches the interview because the full name occurs once on the register, the Kobe relatives list names the Lubavitch circle in Brooklyn as his contact, and the place and date fit the route: Vilna, Japan, Canada, 1941. The article calls Vilna his native city, whereas the Kobe list gives Chelm as his birthplace; the archive leaves the difference as printed (The Australian Jewish News, Melbourne, 29 July 1977, National Library of Israel, Historical Jewish Press).
• Rabbi Michoel Seligson, "Our Heros: Reb Yosef M. M. Tenenbaum (1917-1993)" — full biography provided by owner (Chabad community publication)

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