The Rescue of the Mir Yeshiva: Vilna, Kobe, Shanghai
The only yeshiva to survive intact: some three hundred people crossed Russia and Japan to Shanghai and sat out the war there without interrupting their studies.
In the autumn of 5700 the yeshiva of Mir, which had fled to Vilna, was trapped: the Soviet border was about to close and there were no visas. The way out was improbable. The Dutch consul Jan Zwartendijk stamped passports stating that no visa was required to enter Curaçao. On that basis the Japanese consul in Kaunas, Chiune Sugihara, began issuing transit visas through Japan against his ministry's explicit orders. He wrote them for nearly a month, issued roughly 2,100 visa documents, and reportedly threw the last blanks from the window of a departing train.
With those visas the yeshiva crossed Russia by the Trans-Siberian railway to Vladivostok, sailed to Kobe, and after some months was moved with the other refugees to occupied Shanghai. There, in the Hongkew district and the Beth Aharon synagogue, the yeshiva studied until the end of the war.
The rosh yeshiva, Rabbi Eliezer Yehuda Finkel, did not travel with them: he had obtained a certificate and left for the Land of Israel in 1939, founding the Jerusalem branch of Mir. The road from Vilna through Kobe to Shanghai was led by Rabbi Chaim Shmulevitz and the mashgiach Rabbi Yechezkel Levenstein, supported from the United States by Rabbi Avraham Kalmanowitz. Afterwards some went to America and some to Jerusalem, where Mir is today the largest yeshiva in the world. Sugihara was recognised as Righteous Among the Nations in 5745.