List of Refugees Assisted by the BEL-HIAS (Belgian Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society) Office (1946)

BACKGROUND

The Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS) is the world’s oldest refugee agency, formally incorporated in 1903. HIAS emerged from the work of several agencies which supported Jews fleeing pogroms in Russia and Eastern Europe beginning in the 1880s.

This data set comes from records of HIAS’s work in France during the war years. HIAS provided assistance to refugees in the form of legal support, monetary aid, and family reunification services, among other things, during this timeframe.

DATABASE

This database includes 423 records of emigrants, leaving French ports, going to various destination.

The fields for this database are as follows:

• Image # (Scan image number within the YIVO folder)       
• Surname
• Given name
• Date of birth
• Place of birth
• Nationality
• Residence – Town
• Street address (Actual addresses can be found on the source document)
• Departure date
• Transit country
• Final destination
• Source (List #)
• Comments

Below are the names of the lists within this collection. Lists in French are translated below the French title.:

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The information contained in this database was indexed from the files available from the Center for Jewish History’s collection of scanned source documents from the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. This data set is from the “Records of HIAS-HICEM Main Office in Europe (RG 245.5, France I-IV)”, File: Box 80, Folder: France IV-255, Reel: 19.30).  It can be accessed online at https://archives.cjh.org/repositories/7/archival_objects/176169

Thank you to Nolan Altman, Director of Data Acquisition and Coordinator of Holocaust Database, for his continued devotion and dedication to JewishGen's important work.  

May 2025