Balter Jonas

Balter Jonas received transit visa no. 2030 at the Japanese consulate in Kaunas on 20 August 1940. The register records rabbinical student - lubavitsch yeshiva, aged 17.

What the register records

Nationality as recorded

Polish

Age in 1940

17

Occupation

Rabbinical Student - Lubavitsch Yeshiva

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, at entry 747, Jonas Balter, born 1923 at Ostrowiec, who came from Lublin; the year agrees with the register's compiled age, and the town with what the archive already holds for this line.
• JDC Japan Emigration List — Kobe yeshivas, 1941 (Mir, Kamieniec, Slonim, Kleck, Radin, Telz, Lubavitch & others)
  No 111; 1923 Ostrowiec; Polish; uncle Rosed Celestyn, Brasil, Sao-Paulo, Rue Irasna 138 B.R.
• 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 Manila Maru on 29 May 1941, bound for South Africa (the Jewish Community of Kobe's list of departures, May 1941 (JDC Archives, AR 33/44 file 53)). The list reads: "Balter Jonas". (Manila Maru, Kobe, 29 May 1941.)
• Arolsen Archives, Bad Arolsen, collection 3.2.1.1 (IRO care-and-maintenance files, Germany): the CM/1 file of a Jonas Balter, born 18 November 1923 at Ostrowiec (folder record 78902133,… — envelope, application for assistance and addendum
  The Arolsen Archives at Bad Arolsen hold a post-war application to the International Refugee Organization by a Jonas Balter, a Polish Jew born 18 November 1923 at Ostrowiec in the Kielce district, released from a sanatorium in Germany on 10 May 1948, who asked to go to Palestine. The name, the year of birth and the town are those of this visa holder, but the applicant wrote that he had lived in Warsaw to 1939 and in Poland from 1939 to 1945, while the Kobe community's departures list has this visa holder leaving Kobe for South Africa in May 1941. Either they are two men of the same name and town, or one of the two records is not his; the file is shown as a lead until that is resolved.
• Arolsen Archives, Bad Arolsen, collection 3.2.1.1 (IRO care-and-maintenance files, Germany): the CM/1 file of a Jonas Balter, born 18 November 1923 at Ostrowiec (folder record 78902133,… — envelope, application for assistance and addendum

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