Jakob Ederman

Jakob Ederman received transit visa no. 880 at the Japanese consulate in Kaunas on 2 August 1940. The register records rabbinical student - mir yeshiva, aged 19.

What the register records

Nationality as recorded

Polnisch

Age in 1940

19

Occupation

Rabbinical Student - Mir Yeshiva

The journey

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

What is known

Yaakov (Jacob) Ederman, born 1921 in Luck, Poland, was a Mir yeshiva student who fled with the yeshiva to Vilna in October 1939. Fluent in Polish, he negotiated with the Polish legation at the British consulate in Kaunas to obtain roughly 300 certificates for yeshiva members lacking valid passports. He left for Japan in early 1941 bearing Sugihara transit visa #880, stayed in Kobe until fall 1941, then went to Shanghai for the rest of the war, immigrating to the United States in 1947.

Where this comes from

• Study of the Mir Yeshiva's wartime displacement — the yeshiva's flight from Poland into Lithuania, its billeting at Keidan and Kedainiai, and its passage through Kobe to Shanghai.
  named in this history of the Mir Yeshiva's escape
• USHMM pa1117025: Yaakov Ederman entertains guests at a Jewish wedding in Shanghai.
  The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum's biography of Rabbi Jacob (Yaakov) Ederman states his transit visa number: 880. That is this line. The register enters him as a rabbinical student of nineteen at the Mir yeshiva, with a visa of 2 August 1940. As with the Melamed family, the identification rests on a number the family itself states, not on the spelling of a name.
• Collections Search - United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
• Mir yeshiva students in Shanghai, c. 1945–46 (photograph 30207, Max Reid), courtesy of Rabbi Jacob Ederman