Rozen Szloma

Rozen Szloma received transit visa no. 1472 at the Japanese consulate in Kaunas on 7 August 1940. The register records shoemaker, aged 22.

What the register records

Nationality as recorded

Polnisch

Age in 1940

22

Occupation

Shoemaker

The journey

Reached Japan; aided by the Polish ambassador Tadeusz Romer; registered in Kobe for Palestine.

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 a Szloma Rozen at entry 4901, born 1925, who had come from Łomża. It is shown as a lead, not as this person: born 1925 against the register's age of 22, which puts the birth about 1918; the line is hard to read, so the year is uncertain too.
• 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 269 of the Kobe community's list of refugees and their relatives abroad: aged 22, born at Siedlce, a shoemaker; relatives abroad: aunts, M. Mesylot, Doar Bejt Alfa, M. Miedzyrzecka, and Lea Truchil, 2032 Creston Avenue, Bronx, New York.
• S.S. Fusimi Maru, Kobe to Bombay, en route to Palestine, 19 May 1941 — list of refugee passengers, HICEM meeting half the cost of the passages. JDC Archives, New York, collection AR 33/44, file 00053, item 00766. One sheet carries four s…
  Listed as "ROZEN Szloma" among the refugee passengers who left Kobe to Bombay on the Fusimi Maru. The compiled register independently records this line as bound for Palestine — which is where this ship was going. The two agree without being derived from one another.
• JDC Archives, New York, collection AR 33/44 file 53 (the Jewish Community of Kobe's returns to the JDC, 1941; Set I, item 00761) — Set… — "List of refugees who left Japan to places other than Shanghai in the month of May 1941", Nos. 1–321
  He left Kobe on the Fusimi Maru on 21 May 1941, bound for Bombay on the way to Palestine (the Jewish Community of Kobe's list of departures, May 1941 (JDC Archives, AR 33/44 file 53)). The list reads: "Rozen Szloma". (Fusimi Maru, Kobe, 21 May 1941.)
• Izkor — the fallen of the Jewish Brigade and of Kfar Etzion, read 18 October 2026
  Izkor, the Israeli Ministry of Defence's memorial to the fallen, gives his life: born at Siedlce on 17 March 1919, a member of HaShomer HaDati, he escaped to Vilna in the war and reached the Land of Israel in September 1941 by way of Russia and Japan. He was among the first settlers of Kfar Etzion in 1943 and was its signaller during the siege; he fell when Kfar Etzion fell, on 13 May 1948, and was reburied on Mount Herzl in November 1949. He wrote of his wartime journey in a book, Mitokh ha-mapolet (Am Oved, Tel Aviv). The birthplace and year agree with the Kobe community's list of refugees. (Izkor, read 18 October 2026.)

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