Szmuel Szczedrowicki

Szmuel Szczedrowicki received transit visa no. 974 at the Japanese consulate in Kaunas on 3 August 1940. The register records rabbi, aged 32.

What the register records

Nationality as recorded

Polnisch

Age in 1940

32

Occupation

Rabbi

Family, per the Kitade-Bluman list

wife Szyfra (35), children Chaim Dawid (11), Bella (8), Tauba (5), Eliezer (3))

The journey

Reached Japan; reached Shanghai; aided by the Polish ambassador Tadeusz Romer; registered in Kobe for Palestine.

Travelled with, and never given a number

• Szyfra — wife, aged 35
• Chaim Dawid — child, aged 11

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

• 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 633 of the Kobe Jewish Community's refugee register (also numbered 396): aged 34, born at Bialystok, a rabbi, who arrived in Japan from Vilnius on 24 February 1941.
• 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 24 Feb 1941 (line 974)
• Haaretz, 2 February 1942, and HaTzofe, 3 February 1942 (National Library of Israel, Historical Jewish Press)
  Szmuel Szczedrowicki reached Palestine by way of India. In February 1942 Haaretz (2 February) and HaTzofe (3 February) printed a list of immigrants then on their way from India to the Land of Israel, and on it is 'Szczedrowicki Shmuel, his wife and four children' (National Library of Israel, Historical Jewish Press).
• HaDerech (Jerusalem), 31 July 1947 (National Library of Israel, Historical Jewish Press)
  By 1947 he was Rabbi Shmuel Szczedrowicki, chairman of the Agudat Yisrael youth movement in the Land of Israel; HaDerech of Jerusalem reported on 31 July 1947 that he had come back from a mission to the United States for World Agudath Israel (National Library of Israel, Historical Jewish Press).
• Maariv, 30 November 1970 (National Library of Israel, Historical Jewish Press)
  The family settled in Tel Aviv. When his wife Szyfra — Rebbetzin Shifra Szczedrowicki — died in November 1970, Maariv (30 November 1970) described him as deputy chairman of Agudat Israel's national centre and a member of the board of the Tel Aviv Religious Council; she was buried at Kiryat Shaul (National Library of Israel, Historical Jewish Press).
• 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…
  The Kobe community's list of refugees and their relatives abroad has Szmuel Szczedrowicki, born in 1907 at Bialystok, with his wife Szyfra, born in 1905 at Kielce.

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