Melamedowicz Icchok received transit visa no. 1768 at the Japanese consulate in Kaunas on 14 August 1940. Aged 37 in 1940.
What the register records
Nationality as recorded
Polnisch
Age in 1940
37
Family, per the Kitade-Bluman list
husband of #1758, child Leib (Leo) (8)
The journey
Reached Japan; aided by the Polish ambassador Tadeusz Romer; registered in Kobe for USA.
What is known
A Japanese transit visa stamp issued at the Consulate du Japon in Kaunas, Lithuania, dated 21 August 1940, permitting transit through Japan en route to Curacao and other Netherlands colonies. The stamp bears the Japanese consular seal and Japanese script; It is catalogued here under the name Leo Melamed, whose family escaped via Sugihara transit visas.
Icchok Melamdowicz, a Yiddish mathematics teacher and prominent Bundist in Bialystok, fled the city in September 1939, then to Vilna, later summoning his wife Fejga and son Lejb. After the Soviet seizure of Lithuania, the family received two of the last Sugihara visas (numbers 1758 and 1768) on August 14, 1940, despite lacking destination visas. They traveled via the Trans-Siberian railroad from Moscow to Vladivostok, by boat to Japan (Fejga and Lejb to Kobe, Icchok to Tokyo to obtain American visas), then sailed on the Hidaka Maru to Seattle, arriving April 18, 1941. Lejb's two grandmothers, aunt, and cousins remained behind and perished in the Holocaust, burned in a Bialystok synagogue…
A Sugihara transit visa was stamped in Icchok Melamdowicz's passport even though he had no actual Curaçao visa; Sugihara nonetheless used the Curaçao stamp at the top to legitimize the transit visa. The fine print required the bearer to complete arrangements for his final destination before boarding the ship at Vladivostok, but this step never actually occurred. Melamdowicz later became known as Leo Melamed of Illinois.
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… #455, 37, b. Bialystok, teacher, arr 2.2, from Vilno
hunt/familysearch: US arrival manifest: Icchok Melamdowicz, Seattle, 1941 "Seattle Passenger Lists", FamilySearch, entry for Icchok Melamdowicz, 1941. Ship: Heian Maru. Matched from the Heian Maru's Polish-born passenger list (198 people, of whom 57 matched the register). Register No.1768 'Melamdowicz Cichok' records age 37; the manifest gives born 1904, arriving 1
USHMM pa1110057: Wooden crayon case given to Lejb Melamdowicz (now Leo Melamed) while studying at a Japanese school. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum's biography of Leo Melamed — born Lejb Melamdowicz at Białystok on 20 March 1932, son of Icchok and Fejga — states the family's transit visa numbers outright: 1758 and 1768, issued on 14 August 1940. Those are these two lines of the register, and both carry that date. The register enters them as husband and wife and its companion notes record a child, Leib (Leo), aged eight. This is an identification made on a number rather than on a name. The archive would ordinarily go no further than a spelling — the register writes Melamedowicz on one line and Melamdowicz on the other — but a family that states its own visa numbers, and a register that agrees on both numbers and the date, is a different order of evidence.
Port of Humanity Tsuruga Museum, correspondence of 3 September 2026 (Mami Yamada) — the provenance of the Melamed visa facsimile shown in the museum's exhibition. Answering the archive's question, the museum checked with its first direct… How the facsimile of this visa reached Tsuruga, established by the museum at the archive's request. The Port of Humanity Tsuruga Museum went back to its first director and reports that the images were given to Tsuruga City directly by Leo Melamed — the visa holder's son — in correspondence with him, and not through any intermediary. The museum had already identified the visa as this man's, and had held the images since before 2014; this archive arrived at the same identification separately and afterwards. Given by Mami Yamada, Port of Humanity Tsuruga Museum, 3 September 2026.
Shiraishi Masaaki, Sugihara Chiune: The Duty and Humanity of an Intelligence Officer, translated by Gaynor Sekimori (Tokyo: Japan Publishing Industry Foundation for Culture, 2021), chapter 'Solving the Mystery of the Visas for Life', p.…
