Dedicated Le’ilui Nishmat Morris Setton a’h
Last week, we spoke about the pasuk that says that Hashem can save in the smallest or biggest of ways, and there is nothing stopping Him.
One of the examples of this, that comes to mind, is the escape of the Mirrer Yeshiva from Poland to the shores of America, traveling through Russia and Japan.
The details of this voyage are mind boggling. Eventually, the Mirrer Yeshiva ended up in Flatbush, and had a tremendous impact on our community.
A great man from our community, who passed away a few weeks ago, Mr. Morris Setton AH, considered himself, until the end of his life, to be a young bucher/Yeshiva boy from the Mirrer Yeshiva. He was a student of Rabbi Abraham Kalmanowitz, who saved the Mirrer Yeshiva, and went on to save many community members as well, from Egypt and other places. At one point, he took in a group of young men from Egypt and gave them the stamp of the Mirrer Yeshiva. But none of that would have been possible without the rescue of the Mirrer Yeshiva from Europe to America.
So here’s a little background:
Russia and Germany agreed to split up Poland and eventually gave Vilna its own status, which led to Vilna becoming somewhat of a safe haven.
On Succot 1930, Rav Chaim Ozer Grodzensky, the Gadol HaDor, was aging, and held a minyan in his house. At the minyan, he got word of what was going on, and on Yom Tov, sent an emergency telegram to all boys in all Yeshivas, to take advantage and go to Vilna. At the same time, he asked his student in America, Rabbi Eliezer Silver, to start the Vaad Hatzolah to try and get people out of Europe.
The Mirrer Yeshiva was one of the Yeshivas that relocated to Vilna, but they needed to find a new location, somewhere that would let them in. No one could leave Vilna, however, without an entrance visa to somewhere.
Then, in the summer of 1940, Jan Zwartendijk who was working as a salesman for the Phillips Electric company, temporarily took over as a substitute Dutch Consul in Kovno. He began issuing entry permits to Curaçao, with the help of a Yeshiva boys from Telz, Natan Gutwirth, also a Dutch national.
Natan was homesick and liked to follow sports, so he would get newspapers from Jan and talk sports with him. They were fellow countrymen, both in Kovno. But Natan wanted to leave, so he asked Jan for an entry visa to Curaçao. Jan told him he actually didn’t need a visa to go there, that as long as they’d accept him, it wasn’t a problem. And he agreed to write on his passport, “No visa necessary.”
Once Natan had this way out, word spread and the Mirrer Yeshiva realized that they could also use this “No Visa Necessary,” stamp. The problem was that they didn’t have passports.
They were able to acquire makeshift passports from some other Consul, made up of pieces of paper with their photographs stapled to them. The chief of police verified these “passports,” and 400 men from Mirrer Yeshiva got the temporary visas that would allow them into Curaçao.
Now they needed visas from Japan, to go through on their way. They needed to go through Russia to get to Japan, and Russia would only let them out if they had a place to go.
During the summer of 1940, there was a Japanese Consulate in the embassy whose last name was Sugihara. He was on his way back to Japan, as his work in Kovno was over. He decided that he would give these boys temporary transit visas to Japan. For the next two weeks, a yeshiva boy from Mirrer by the name of Zupnick sat with Sugihara’s assistant, Wolfgang Guds (who was a Nazi but did not hate Jews) stamping visas day and night for the Mirrer Yeshiva.
So now they had makeshift paper passports with photos stapled onto them, transit visas to travel through Japan, and a non-visa entry to their final destination ( to which they had no plans to going) of Curaçao.
Now they needed money for train fare through Russia. Russia would only allow them to purchase first class tickets, because they did not really want to let them out. Regular tickets were $6, but first class tickets were $240, and they had two weeks to raise this immense sum for the 400 students.
Rabbi Kalmanowitz, along with Mr. Irving Bunim, borrowed the money. Then they drove, on Shabbat, from shul to shul, to raise the money that they needed to cover the loan.
The Mirrer Yeshiva was finally ready to get on their train.
As you can see, there were many, many, little pieces of the story… Hashem got an entire Yeshiva out on flimsy paper with stapled pictures, with almost nonexistent visas, signed and stamped by temporary consuls who didn’t even belong where they were .
Tomorrow, B’ezrat Hashem, we will continue the story…