Motel Klejn

Motel Klejn received transit visa no. 793 at the Japanese consulate in Kaunas on 2 August 1940. The register records yeshiva, aged 27.

What the register records

Nationality as recorded

Polnisch

Age in 1940

27

Occupation

Yeshiva

The journey

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

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 8047, Motel Klejn, born 1913 at Ozdziutycze, who had come from Włodawa; the year and the town agree with the Kobe community's refugee register.
• 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 140 of the Kobe community's list of refugees and their relatives abroad: Polish; relatives abroad: a cousin, Fredann Bros, 614 Adams Street, Peoria, Illinois, USA.
• 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 358 of the Kobe Jewish Community's refugee register: aged 28, born at Ozdziutycze, a student, who arrived in Japan from Vilnius on 2 February 1941.
• JDC Shanghai migration file: KLEJN Motel
  A possible record, not yet confirmed as this person: the JDC's Shanghai migration files (JDC Archives, New York, collection AR 33/44, file 14) have a Motel Klejn among the refugees in Shanghai. The register has two men named Motel Klejn; the town in the other Shanghai records points to this one, No. 793, but the file gives no town or year of its own.
• 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 2 Feb 1941 (line 793)
• Archive note, 30 August 2026 — a correction to the Kobe attributions. Thirteen register entries had been matched to two lines each of the Kobe refugee register, on the strength of a similar surname. In seven cases the two lines described…
  This entry had been given Kobe entry 24 as well as entry 140. Entry 24, on page 23, is KLEIN Lotte — a woman of twenty-one from Vienna, a corset maker, with an uncle Fred Klein at 1360 Plimpton Avenue in the Bronx. The register has a man of twenty-seven at a yeshiva. Entry 140, on page 16, is KLEJN Motel, whose cousin worked at Fredann Bros of 614 Adams Street, Peoria, Illinois; that is the line that remains.
• "California, San Francisco, Passenger Lists, 1893-1953", FamilySearch — index entry for Motel Klejne, 1948: born about 1914, Poland. Digitised from NARA microfilm publication M1410 (passenger lists of vessels arriving at San Francisco).…
  A possible record, not yet confirmed as this person: FamilySearch's index of the San Francisco passenger lists, read by the archive on 20 September 2026, has a Motel Klejne, born about 1914 in Poland, landing at San Francisco in 1948. The year fits this man, born in 1913 at Ozdziutycze, but the register has two men named Motel Klejn and the index gives no town, so the sheet itself is needed to be sure.
• La-karov ve-la-rachok, 31 March 1946 — the Far Eastern Palestine Committee's list of Jewish refugees in Shanghai (National Library of Israel, Historical Jewish Press)
  The Far Eastern Palestine Committee's list of Jewish refugees in Shanghai, printed by the Jewish Agency Search Bureau's bulletin La-karov ve-la-rachok on 31 March 1946, lists Motel Klein: born 1913 at Ozdziutycze, a merchant, arrived in 1941 from Wilno; the year and the town agree with the Kobe Jewish community's refugee register (National Library of Israel, Historical Jewish Press). Of the register's two men named Motel Klejn, this is the one the Kobe community's refugee register records, born at Ozdziutycze; the other, No. 725, travelled with Roman and Josiel-Szmaro Klejn, on the lines either side of him in Sugihara's ledger.
• United States, Missouri, Naturalization Records, 1843-1991 — FamilySearch, index entries read 24 October 2026
  FamilySearch's index of the Missouri naturalization records, read on 24 October 2026, has Motel Klejn, born 18 July 1913 at Ozdziutycze in Wolyn, naturalized at St. Louis on 29 November 1948, with a second index entry of March 1950. Two men named Motel Klejn are on the register, but only No. 793 is placed at Ozdziutycze, by the Kobe register and the 1940 Vilna list, and the birth year agrees, so the entry is taken as this man.

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