Place
Shanghai שנגחאי
The port that in the 1940s took people without a visa when other doors had closed: some twenty thousand refugees and an entire yeshiva survived the war there.
Shanghai required no visa, and that saved thousands when every other door had closed. Some reached it on Japanese transit visas issued in Kaunas; among the arrivals was the Mir yeshiva almost in full.
The Japanese authorities confined the Jewish refugees to the Hongkou district but refused to hand them over to their ally. The yeshiva went on learning there until the end of the war, and then dispersed to America and the Land of Israel.
On the timeline
5700 · 1940 CEThe Rescue of the Mir Yeshiva: Vilna, Kobe, Shanghai5699 · 1939 CEThe Shoah: the Destruction of European Jewry5780 · 2020 CEThe Flourishing of Torah Study and Daf Yomi
Sources
Documents of the period
- Transit visa lists, Kaunas, 1940 — the visas by which refugees reached Japan and from there Shanghai
Basis: documents and evidence.