Isaak-Ber Uszpol

Isaak-Ber Uszpol received transit visa no. 705 at the Japanese consulate in Kaunas on 1 August 1940. The register records rabbi, aged 29.

What the register records

Nationality as recorded

Polnisch

Age in 1940

29

Occupation

Rabbi

The journey

Reached Japan; registered in Kobe for USA.

What is known

Isaak-Ber Uszpol — written 'Izak Serg Urszul' by the manifest clerk — twenty-five, of Poland, sailed from Kobe on 10 October 1940 aboard the President Cleveland, bound for the United States: one of the refugees who shared the crossing with Szaps Jaskolka, register No. 805.

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 6787, Izaak-Ber Uszpol, who came from Kurenice; nothing there confirms or contradicts the register, but the full name occurs once on the register, and the archive treats the entry as this person's on that basis alone.
• "California, San Francisco, Passenger Lists, 1893-1953", FamilySearch — index entry for Izaak-Ber Uszpol, 1940: born about 1911, Poland. Digitised from NARA microfilm publication M1410 (passenger lists of vessels arriving at San Francisc…
  FamilySearch's index of the San Francisco passenger lists, read by the archive on 20 September 2026, has Izaak-Ber Uszpol, born about 1911 in Poland, arriving at San Francisco in 1940. The register's compiled line gives 1911, and the two agree. The name occurs once on the register, and a Polish-born passenger landing at San Francisco in 1940 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 Cleveland, sailing from Kobe 10 October 1940, arrived San Francisco late October 1940 (NARA, passenger lists of vessels arriving at San Francisco, M1410, film 365; read on FamilySearch's copy)
  The manifest of the President Cleveland, Kobe 10 October 1940 to San Francisco 25 October, lists Izaak-Ber Uszpol, aged 29, married, a rabbi, Polish, born at Święciany, speaking Yiddish and Polish, with a Polish-quota immigration visa issued at Tokyo on 9 October 1940, the day before the ship sailed; he was going to his wife, Frieda K. Uszpol, at 1275 46th Street, Brooklyn. The age is the one recorded for this visa holder and the trade is the register's. National Archives microfilm of the San Francisco passenger lists, read on FamilySearch's copy of the page David Rosen pointed out, October 2026.
• Der Tog (New York), 9 May 1969 (National Library of Israel, Historical Jewish Press)
  Rabbi Yitzchak Dov (Isaak-Ber) Ushpol taught at the Lubavitch yeshiva in Vilna. After the war he was a rosh yeshiva at the central Lubavitch yeshiva in Brooklyn and, from about 1954, rabbi of the Lubavitch congregation in Boro Park. He wrote the halakhic work Darkhei Chesed. The New York Yiddish daily Der Tog reported the congregation's dinner for his fifteenth year as its rabbi on 9 May 1969 (National Library of Israel, Historical Jewish Press).

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