Goldman Simon

Goldman Simon received transit visa no. 2029 at the Japanese consulate in Kaunas on 20 August 1940. The register records rabbinical student - lubavitsch yeshiva, aged 15.

What the register records

Nationality as recorded

Polish

Age in 1940

15

Occupation

Rabbinical Student - Lubavitsch Yeshiva

The journey

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

What is known

Shimon Goldman was a boy among classmates — he fled Poland with his yeshiva and never met the consul whose stamp carried him out; his teachers stood in the Kaunas lines for him. He rebuilt in New York and died at ninety-one having held more than a hundred descendants, "each great-grandchild clutched to his heart... an indication that Hitler did not win." Two years after his death, his son Yossy sat on floor mats at a Japanese tea house in Philadelphia, took Nobuki Sugihara's hand, and said what his father never could: "None of us would be here if not for your father. I'm sure there's a special place in heaven for him."

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 1703, Szymon Goldman, born 1925 at Siedlce, who came from Siedlce; the year agrees with the register's compiled age, and the town with what the archive already holds for this line.
• 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 228 of the Kobe Jewish Community's refugee register: aged 16, born at Siedlce, a yeshiva student, who arrived in Japan from Vilnius on 13 February 1941.
• JDC Japan Emigration List — Kobe yeshivas, 1941 (Mir, Kamieniec, Slonim, Kleck, Radin, Telz, Lubavitch & others)
  No 127/18; 1925 Siedlce; Polish
• 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 2029)
• "California, San Francisco, Passenger Lists, 1893-1953", FamilySearch — index entry for Szymon Goldmann, 1946: born about 1925, 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 Szymon Goldmann, born about 1925 in Poland, arriving at San Francisco in 1946 on the General M. C. Meigs. The register's compiled line gives 1925, 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 486, 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)
  The list of students of the Lubavitch yeshiva Tomche Tmimim in Shanghai gives his birth as 1 January 1925, in Siedlce, and his Polish passport as No. G-125/3/17/41. 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.)
• UNRRA China Office, S-1132-0000-0181, Mizrachi members list and the United Board of Rabbis' birth-data pages, Shanghai 1945–46 (UN Archives, AG-018-001)
  The United Board of Rabbis and Rabbinical Colleges in Shanghai listed him among its members after the war, born in 1925 in Siedlec. (United Nations Archives, UNRRA China Office records.)
• La-karov ve-la-rachok, 28 March 1946 — the Far Eastern Palestine Committee's list of Jewish refugees in Shanghai (National Library of Israel, Historical Jewish Press)
  The Far Eastern Palestine Committee's list of Jewish refugees in Shanghai, printed by the Jewish Agency Search Bureau's bulletin La-karov ve-la-rachok on 28 March 1946, lists Szymon Goldmann: born 1925 at Siedlce, a yeshiva student, arrived in 1941 from Otwock; the year, the town and the trade agree with the 1940 Vilna refugee list, the Kobe Jewish community's refugee register (National Library of Israel, Historical Jewish Press).
• The Shanghai Ledger — register of Polish citizens kept by the Consulate of Poland in Shanghai, 1934-1943 (original at the Archives of the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, ref. 43/2003; digitised by the Library of Congress; indexed as…
  The Polish consulate's Shanghai ledger has Szymon Goldman on page 1391. The name occurs only once on Sugihara's list and the ledger is the register of Polish citizens in Shanghai, where the route of his visa ended; that is the basis of this attachment. Sugihara's ledger writes his given name Simon; the Shanghai ledger has Szymon.
• Peter Crimmins, WHYY (18 May 2019): "The Oskar Schindler of Japan remembered in Philly" — Nobuki Sugihara meets Rabbi Yossy Goldman at Shofuso tea house; father Rabbi SHIMON… — the same event where Barak Sella met Nobuki (records 725/772)

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