Postcard from Shanghai to Mir 1942
On November 8, 1942 Mejer Paderski mailed a postcard from Shanghai to his father,
Wolf Paderski in Mir, Poland. |
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Mejer Paderski wrote the message below to his family in Mir.
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Translation:
Dear Parents, Brother and Sister and family.
I wish you all health and a good year.
Your son, Mejer Paderski.
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The postcard was never delivered.
According to later records from Yad Vashem, the Nazis had murdered most of this family by the time that Mejer attempted to communicate with them. Their names are included in post war lists of persecuted persons. List of murdered Jews from Mir in 1941-1942 |
| After the war, Pages of Testimony were completed by his brother Yosef/Josef, for Mejer’s father Wolf, his mother Miriam and his sister Batia and his brother Simcha, as well as other family members. In total, Yosef Paderski submitted pages of testimony for 21 people who had been murdered in Mir and the nearby town of Hrodei. |
Yosef Paderski, who was born in 1912, worked as a shoemaker before the war.
He
is listed as a Jewish Partisan in Belarus in the Kalinina Unit between 1941-1944. https://www.jewishgen.org/databases/holocaust/0218_Belarus_partisans.html
Some information about Yosef/Josef Paderski's experiences in the forest can be found in a recently translated chapter in the Mir Memorial Book (Sefer Mir). It is titled Memories of the German Occupation. |
Meir/Mejer Padersk is noted in a Sugihara List of August_27_2021 as a 29 year old Mir Yeshiva student who eventually went to the United States.
Information about him is also available in the JewishGen Database.
His name is included on a list of the Jewish Community of Kobe (Ashkenazim) under Polish subjects in Febrary of 1941. He is identified as 30 years old, born in Mir, associated with the Yeshiva, having arrived on Feb 25 from Kovno.
Later in 1941 all of the Mir Yeshiva faculty and students in Kobe were sent to Shanghai, along with the rest of the immigrant Jews in Kobe. |
| Meir Paderski survived the war years in Shanghai. Records indicate that on 4 January 1947, he entered the United States at San Francisco on board SS General M C Meigs. His visa had been issued in Shanghai on 4 September 1946. |
His US naturalization petition gave his address as 611 Belmont Avenue, Brooklyn New York. Occupation - assistant cutter; born 19 February 1910, age 43. Height 5'2", fair complexion, brown eyes and hair; not married and no children. Alien reg. number A6 694 168.
It took a US government Concurrent Resolution of June 27, 1951 to allow Mejer Paderski and a large number of other alien displaced persons to become permanent residents. Once his application for US citizenship was granted, he took the oath of allegiance on 8 April 1954 in Brooklyn, Kings County New York. |
Meir/Mejer Paderski died in Israel on 24 March 1974
Below is the headstone of Meir in Petah Tikva Sgula Cemetery. |
Here is buried
My dear brother
noble
soul
who pursued Tzedakah and righteousness
Rabbi Meir
Padersky
The son of R. Zeev
Died on Rosh Hodesh of Nisan 5734 |
| His gravestone below is a memorial to his family lost during the Holocaust. |
In memory of his parents
Zeev, son of R. Aryeh and Shulamit Myri, daughter of R. Zvi,
his sister Batia and brothers Aryeh and Simcha
who were killed in the Shoah.
HYD 9Hashem will revenge their blood
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Meir's brother Yosef Paderski survived in the forests of what is now Belarus. He emigrated to Israel after the war. He and his wife Aliza had three children. Yosef died in Israel in 1996.
He and his wife are also buried in Petah Tikva Sgula Cemetery.
Yosef Padersky
"Here is buried
my husband, our dear father and grandfather
a humble and righteous
loving of and beloved by people
Yosef Padersky
son of R. Zeev
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NOTES There is no information that the card ever arrived in Mir, but the Nazi postmark in the lower left corner confirms that the card arrived in German controlled territory. |
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Additional information about Wolf/Zeev Paderski from the Nowogrodek Province 1929 Polish Business Directory indicates that his occupation in Mir was related to leather and fabric. A female Paderski sold shoes. |
Information about Mejer's return address in Shanghai: HICEM (HIAS ICA-Emigdirect) was supported by a combination of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, the Hebrew Sheltering and Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS), and the London-based Jewish Colonization Association (ICA). The HIAS and, later, HICEM bureau, the Far Eastern Jewish Central Information Bureau for Emigrants, also known as DALJEWCIB, its telegraphic acronym, was located in Harbin until 1939, when it moved to Shanghai. |
The postcard above comes from the philatelic collection of Keith Charles Stanley.
It was discovered in 2024 by his son-in-law Colin Brown who kindly shared it with this Mir website.
He also helped provide documentation on Mejer Paderski's journey to Shanghai and to America. |
