Zelcer Aba

Zelcer Aba received transit visa no. 1450 at the Japanese consulate in Kaunas on 7 August 1940. The register records rabbinical student - mir yeshiva, aged 29.

What the register records

Nationality as recorded

Polnisch

Age in 1940

29

Occupation

Rabbinical Student - Mir Yeshiva

The journey

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

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 6846, Aba Zelcer, born 1910 at Wolozyn, who came from Wolozyn; 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 733 of the Kobe Jewish Community's refugee register: aged 30, born at Wolczyn, a yeshiva student, who arrived in Japan from Kaunas on 13 February 1941.
• JDC Japan Emigration List — Kobe yeshivas, 1941 (Mir, Kamieniec, Slonim, Kleck, Radin, Telz, Lubavitch & others)
  56 1910 Wolczyn; cous.Luis Seltzer 2081 davidson av Bronx N.Y.
• 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 13 Feb 1941 (line 1450)
• "California, San Francisco, Passenger Lists, 1893-1953", FamilySearch — index entry for Aba Zelcer, 1947: born about 1911, Poland. Digitised from NARA microfilm publication M1410 (passenger lists of vessels arriving at San Francisco). Sh…
  FamilySearch's index of the San Francisco passenger lists, read by the archive on 20 September 2026, has Aba Zelcer, born about 1911 in Poland, arriving at San Francisco in 1947 on the General M. C. Meigs. The register's compiled line gives 1911, 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 1947 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 387, image 686, read by the archive on 20 September 2026.
• 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 Aba Zelcer, 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)
  Aba Zelcer is named on all 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.

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