Almost no one crossed alone. Each dot is a person on Sugihara's register; the threads are the families the ledger keeps together, the ships they shared, the yeshivot that moved as one, and the hometowns they came from. Pull a thread and the households, the sailings, the schools and the shtetls draw into a single web.
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This web is drawn only from what the record already shows: 232 families found where adjacent register lines share a surname, 3 sailings matched to their Seattle passenger lists, the 348 people whose occupation names the yeshiva they belonged to, and 14 hometowns each shared by three or more people, read from birthplaces on the JDC's 1941 Kobe yeshiva roll and on matched arrival papers. A shared town is a documented origin — for the small shtetls, a real community — but not, by itself, a friendship; the web draws the tie the sources record and asserts nothing past it.
They were not all Mirrer. The Kobe yeshiva story is usually told as one school's escape, and the yeshiva thread on this page used to be drawn that way — a single hub labelled "Kobe yeshivot" with everybody hanging off it. That is wrong, and the register says so. Of the 348 people whose occupation names a school, 227 were Mir and 121 were not: 12 other institutions, each of which had its own rosh yeshiva, its own town, and its own decision to run. Lubavitch sent 36 and Lublin 30; then Kamieniec, Telz, Kleck, Novaredok, Slonim and Radin, down to Slabodka, Warsaw, Białystok and Ostrów, who are one man each — a single student carrying his school's name out of Europe. Every school with more than one member now has its own hub here, so the smaller ones can be seen instead of dissolving into the largest.
The family thread carries two kinds of tie. Most are households the ledger keeps on adjacent lines. But 8 of them are drawn from the visas themselves — where a document names a holder's wife, parent or child who carries a register line of their own, reaching kin the ledger's layout hides, on far-apart numbers or under a married name. Zorach Warhaftig's household, the Lewins at No. 13 and No. 17, and the Soroczkin rabbinical family a thousand numbers apart are joined this way.
The networks meet at their people. A ring marks the 122 who belong to two networks at once — a yeshiva student who is also part of a family, a family whose members share a hometown, a household that also filled a berth on one ship. Follow a ring and you can watch how one network's rescue reached into the next: the yeshiva that crossed together, and then the extended family and townspeople who came out alongside them. Hover any dot to see which threads it holds; click a dot for a card of who they were, with a link to the full record.
Sources: Sugihara's register and the visas' own household records (families); the Seattle passenger lists via FamilySearch (ships); the occupation column of George Bluman and Akira Kitade's Chiune Sugihara Lists, which names a school for each yeshiva member (yeshivot); the JDC Japan Emigration List, Kobe 1941 (hometowns). Where Bluman marks an attribution with a question mark — 10 of them — it is left out rather than counted as settled. A link between two dots means the record connects them, not that the archive can name the bond.