Rabbi Shlomo Usher Schwartzman

[http://amgathering.org/2009/06/4315/in-memoriam-rabbi-solomon-u-sch...] Rabbi Schwartzman was educated in Warsaw, Poland where he was ordained as a Rabbi. He served in WWII in the Polish army. After the German invasion he was captured but escaped. He left Poland for Lithuania and was one of the people who obtained a visa from Sampo Sugihara (see [http://www.yadvashem.org/yv/en/righteous/stories/sugihara.asp]) to go to Japan. Close to the attack on Pearl Harbor, all foreigners were expelled from Japan and were allowed safe haven in the city of Shanghai (China). Rabbi Schwartzman spent 6 years in Shanghai before emigrating to the USA in 1947. (According to records from JRI-Poland and JewishGen, Solomon Usher Schwartzman obtained a visa from Sugihara in Lithuania on August 16, 1941, and arrived in Shanghai on December 14, 1941) The members of his family who remained in Poland perished in the Holocaust. The only other family member who survived was his brother, the late Rabbi Mayer Schwartzman of Winnipeg, Canada who left Poland with his family before the war.

Rabbi Schwartzman served as a Rabbi in various U.S. communities for 41 years. During his stay in Spokane WA he was the civilian chaplain for the Air Force serving several bases in the area. After retiring from the rabbinate in 1989, he and his wife moved to New Haven, CT where he was a chaplain at the Yale-New Haven Hospital.