Ruchla Gleichgewicht

Ruchla Gleichgewicht received transit visa no. 718 at the Japanese consulate in Kaunas on 1 August 1940. Aged 51 in 1940.

What the register records

Nationality as recorded

Polnisch

Age in 1940

51

Family, per the Kitade-Bluman list

mother of #717, husband Isak-Israel (52)--lawyer

The journey

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

Travelled with, and never given a number

• Isak-Israel — husband, aged 52

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

• 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…
  #2095, Warszawa, 1889, from Warszawa
• 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…
  236, 52, Warsaw
• 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…
  Registered with the Polish Consulate in Shanghai (ledger entry 1036); the names closely match this register line — approved by the owner's review, 19 Aug 2026 — LEDGER ENTRY READ: Gleichgewicht Ruchla, 'with her husband', born 1889 Warsaw, married; registered 24 May 1941 — among the very first of the Japan arrivals; 185 Route Dufour; Warsaw passport of 1937 extended by the British Embassy in Kaunas on 14 December 1939 and 27 July 1940.
• JDC Archives, New York, collection AR33-44 file 53 — “List of persons who left Japan for Shanghai and Harbin in the month of May 1941”, compiled by the Jewish Community of Kobe (Ashkenazim) for the American Jewish Joint Distribution Comm…
  Named in the Kobe committee's list of persons who left Japan for Shanghai and Harbin in the month of May 1941 (JDC Archives). The document enters GLEICHGEWICHT ISAK ISRAEL, Polish, sailing for Shanghai on 5 May 1941 with Ruchla and Aleksander. The consular ledger knew him only as four words in a family note — 'husband Isak-Israel (52)'. This is the first document to give him a surname, and it puts the three of them on one sailing.