Nachum Preger received transit visa no. 1840 at the Japanese consulate in Kaunas on 16 August 1940. The register records rabbinical student - lubavitsch yeshiva, aged 18.
What the register records
Nationality as recorded
Lithuanien
Age in 1940
18
Occupation
Rabbinical Student - Lubavitsch Yeshiva
The journey
Reached Japan; reached Shanghai; registered in Kobe for USA.
What is known
Reb Nochum Preger was a student of the Lubavitch yeshiva Tomchei Temimim, from Maloryta, who reached the Japanese consul's window out of the refugee crush in Vilna. In his grandson's account he was the forty-fourth of fifty-two yeshiva students granted visas; the consul's own register carries his line, No. 1840, a transit visa dated 16 August 1940. He took the long way east — Moscow, the Trans-Siberian railway to Vladivostok, then Kobe, where the community's relief roster records him arriving in February 1941 — and on through Shanghai, until at last he crossed to America. He settled on President Street in Brooklyn. On the first night of Passover in 1981 the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Menach… Reb Nochum Preger was a student of the Lubavitch yeshiva Tomchei Temimim, from Maloryta, who reached the Japanese consul's window out of the refugee crush in Vilna. In his grandson's account he was the forty-fourth of fifty-two yeshiva students granted visas; the consul's own register carries his line, No. 1840, a transit visa dated 16 August 1940. He took the long way east — Moscow, the Trans-Siberian railway to Vladivostok, then Kobe, where the community's relief roster records him arriving in February 1941 — and on through Shanghai, until at last he crossed to America. He settled on President Street in Brooklyn. On the first night of Passover in 1981 the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson, passing between two Seders, stopped before the house and asked whether this was his mikdash me'at, his small sanctuary; told that it was, he blessed him that the verse “And I will dwell in them” be fulfilled in fact. The family's story is told by his grandson, Dovid Greenwald.
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… No 537, 19, Maloryta, Yeshiva, 14.2