Israel Oberman

Israel Oberman received transit visa no. 256 at the Japanese consulate in Kaunas on 30 July 1940. The register records merchant, aged 33.

What the register records

Nationality as recorded

Polnisch

Age in 1940

33

Occupation

Merchant

Family, per the Kitade-Bluman list

husband of #245

The journey

Reached Japan; aided by the Polish ambassador Tadeusz Romer; registered in Kobe for South Africa.

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 124 of the Kobe Jewish Community's refugee register: aged 53, born at Warsaw, a merchant, who arrived in Japan on 5 January 1941.
• 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 3 Jan 1941 (line 256)
• S.S. Africa Maru, Kobe to South Africa, April 1941 — list of refugee passengers, HICEM meeting half the cost of the passages. JDC Archives, New York, collection AR 33/44, file 00053, item 00766. One sheet carries four sailings; this is t…
  The passenger list of the Africa Maru, sailing from Kobe for South Africa in April 1941, is two lines long, and both are this family: “Oberman Izrael” and “Oberman Sima (wife)”, two persons, fifty United States cents. The register records them independently as husband and wife, both bound for South Africa. This is a sailing list rather than an arrival record: it shows them leaving Kobe, not reaching Cape Town.
• 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 I pp. 24–32 — April 1941 (and a May continuation sheet)
  He left Kobe on the Africa Maru on 30 April 1941, bound for South Africa (the Jewish Community of Kobe's list of refugees who left Japan in April 1941 (JDC Archives, AR 33/44 file 53)). The list reads: "Oberman Izrael, ″ Sima — Polish — Kobe — South Africa (Africa Maru, 30th)". (Africa Maru, Kobe, 30 April 1941, South Africa.)
• 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 4215, Oberman Izrael, born 1908 at Warsaw, who came from Warsaw, with Oberman Syma, born 1910, beside him; the year agrees with the age the register gives, and the town and his wife with what the archive already holds.

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