Samson Gordon

Samson Gordon received transit visa no. 278 at the Japanese consulate in Kaunas on 30 July 1940. The register records manufacturer, aged 44.

What the register records

Nationality as recorded

Polnisch

Age in 1940

44

Occupation

Manufacturer

Family, per the Kitade-Bluman list

husband of #279, daughter Luba (10)

The journey

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

Travelled with, and never given a number

• Luba — daughter, aged 10

The register recorded visa holders. It did not reliably record the wives and children who travelled on somebody else’s visa, so these people have no entry of their own and cannot be searched for. Where the archive has recovered a name, it is here.

Where this comes from

• The Kobe relatives list — refugees at Kobe in 1941 recorded with their relatives abroad. Seventy-six pages in numbered sheets (LIST No. 7, No. 16 and others), each line giving a name, age, birthplace, occupation and citizenship, and then…
  Entry 91 of the Kobe community's list of refugees and their relatives abroad: born 1895 at Wysokie; relatives abroad: a cousin, Isidor Golub, 144-30 Millside Avenue, New York.
• 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 182 of the Kobe Jewish Community's refugee register: aged 46, born at Wzsokie, a manufacturer, who arrived in Japan on 24 February 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 24 Feb 1941 (line 278)
• "California, San Francisco, Passenger Lists, 1893-1953", FamilySearch — index entry for Samson Gordon, 1941: born about 1896, 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 Samson Gordon, born about 1896 in Poland, arriving at San Francisco in 1941. The register's compiled line gives 1895, and the two are 1 year apart. The name occurs once on the register, and a Polish-born passenger landing at San Francisco in 1941 fits the route through Japan, so the entry is taken as this person's under the archive's rule of 19 September 2026 for records from the route.
• Manifest of alien passengers, SS President Pierce, sailing from Kobe 14 March 1941, arrived San Francisco 29 March 1941 (US National Archives, M1410, film 368; read on FamilySearch's copy)
  He reached San Francisco on 29 March 1941 aboard the President Pierce from Kobe with his wife and their daughter, on a US visitor's visa issued in Moscow on 8 February 1941; the manifest records that he had been in New York before, in 1935–37, and that the family was going to his brother-in-law Isador Golub in Jamaica, Queens (manifest held by the US National Archives, read on FamilySearch's copy). The trade of manufacturer and the daughter are what the register's compilers recorded for him.

×