Eliasz Jurkanski

Eliasz Jurkanski received transit visa no. 806 at the Japanese consulate in Kaunas on 2 August 1940. The register records rabbinical student - mir yeshiva, aged 31.

What the register records

Nationality as recorded

Polnisch

Age in 1940

31

Occupation

Rabbinical Student - Mir 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 7534, Eljasz Jurkanski, born 1908, who had come from Mir; the year agrees with the register's compiled age.
• 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 328 of the Kobe Jewish Community's refugee register: aged 33, born at Baranowicze, a yeshiva student, who arrived in Japan from Kaunas on 3 February 1941.
• JDC Japan Emigration List — Kobe yeshivas, 1941 (Mir, Kamieniec, Slonim, Kleck, Radin, Telz, Lubavitch & others)
  19 1908 Baranowicze Polish
• 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 Feb 1941 (line 806)
• "California, San Francisco, Passenger Lists, 1893-1953", FamilySearch — index entry for Eliasz Jurkanski, 1946: born about 1908, 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 Eliasz Jurkanski, born about 1908 in Poland, arriving at San Francisco in 1946 on the General M. C. Meigs. The register's compiled line gives 1909, and the two are 1 year apart, and the name occurs once on the register. The ship's manifest heading says she sailed from Shanghai, and a passenger born in Poland landing at San Francisco in 1946 from Shanghai is the route's end: the refugees who waited out the war there. So the entry is taken as this person's under the archive's rule of 19 September 2026 for records from the route. The sheet is NARA microfilm publication M1410, film 385, image 485, read by the archive on 20 September 2026.
• UNRRA China Office, S-1132-0000-0181, registration of Polish rabbis and rabbinical students, their lists and sailings, Shanghai 1945–1946 (UN Archives, AG-018-001)
  In 1946 he was among the students accepted by the Mesifta Talmudical Seminary in Brooklyn. (United Nations Archives, UNRRA China Office records.)
• S. Bruchi, "HaRav Eliyohu Yourkansky zt"l", Dei'ah veDibur, 6 Kislev 5766 / 7 December 2005
  Eliasz Jurkanski became HaRav Eliyahu Yourkansky, for more than fifty years one of the teachers of the Mir Yeshiva in New York. Born in Minsk, he had been smuggled into Poland as a boy of eleven to study at the yeshiva in Baranowicze, joined the Mir in 1929, and stayed with it through Kobe and Shanghai. In America he gave the daily lecture at the Mir in Brooklyn and for twelve years an evening lecture at Torah Vodaas. He died in Lakewood, New Jersey, on 28 November 2005, aged 98, and was buried in Jerusalem (*Dei'ah veDibur*, 7 December 2005).
• Reclaim The Records — The NYC Marriage Index, 1950–1995 (from the New York City Clerk's Office)
  The New York City Clerk's marriage index, published by Reclaim The Records, has a licence to marry taken out in Manhattan in 1950 by an Eliasz Jurkanski — the spelling he travelled under — and his is the only such name in the index. The index gives no age or birthplace, so this is a lead, not a proof; the bride is not named here because she may be living.
• The numbered Sugihara visa list, the page of 2 August 1940 carrying Nos. 795 to 865 (among them No. 805, Szaps Jaskolka), photographed beside a ruler.
• JDC Japan Emigration List — Kobe yeshivas, 1941 (Mir, Kamieniec, Slonim, Kleck, Radin, Telz, Lubavitch & others)

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