Blat Pinchos received transit visa no. 2024 at the Japanese consulate in Kaunas on 20 August 1940. The register records rabbinical student - lubavitsch yeshiva, aged 18.
What the register records
Nationality as recorded
Polish
Age in 1940
18
Occupation
Rabbinical Student - Lubavitsch Yeshiva
The journey
Reached Japan; reached Shanghai; registered in Kobe for USA.
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… Entry 52 of the Kobe Jewish Community's refugee register: aged 19, born at Otwock, a yeshiva student, who arrived in Japan from Vilnius on 14 February 1941.
JDC Shanghai migration file: BLAT Pinchos JDC Archives, New York collection AR3344, 'Complete Shanghai Migration Files' (NY_AR3344_00014), page 8: BLAT Pinchos, file no. 6387. Match: register No.2024 'Blat Pinchos', and the register independently records this person as reaching Shanghai. Both name parts agree. NOTE: the index carries no age
"California, San Francisco, Passenger Lists, 1893-1953", FamilySearch — index entry for Pinches Blat, 1946: born about 1922, Poland. Digitised from NARA microfilm publication M1410 (passenger lists of vessels arriving at San Francisco).… FamilySearch's index of the San Francisco passenger lists, read by the archive on 20 September 2026, has Pinches Blat, born about 1922 in Poland, arriving at San Francisco in 1946 on the General M. C. Meigs. The register's compiled line gives 1922, 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 1946 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 384, image 506, read by the archive on 20 September 2026.
UNRRA China Office, S-1132-0000-0181, registration of Polish rabbis and rabbinical students, their lists and sailings, Shanghai 1945–1946 (UN Archives, AG-018-001) UNRRA's China Office registered him in Shanghai in 1946 among the Polish rabbis and rabbinical students, as a rabbinical student who had arrived in China in August 1941 and wished to go on to Palestine. The list of students of the Lubavitch yeshiva Tomche Tmimim in Shanghai gives his birth as 11 May 1922, in Otwock. He was listed among the passengers for the General Meigs to the United States in July 1946 with the Polish rabbinical students of the '29 group'. (United Nations Archives, UNRRA China Office records.)