Leon's Certificat d’Inscription au Registre des Etrangers
Leon (Laizer) Katz Raber
Leon (Laizer) Katz Raber was born August 4th, 1918, as the second oldest of five children to Malka Sura Raber Katz and Shmuel Alter Katz. The family resided in Selisht (Ludwipol), Poland. Leon survived World War II having been a slave labourer in his shtetl of Ludwipol (1941-1942) and then a partisan (1942-1944). As a partisan, he damaged railway tracks, burned buildings, and cut telegraph lines. Leon was then conscripted into the Red Army (1944-1946). After the war, Leon worked for the Jewish Agency for Israel and was assigned to Brussels, Belgium to demolish army barracks to be shipped to Israel.
Name of Exhibit: From Statelessness To Citizenship
Submitted by: Frayda Raber
Date of Origin: February 4th, 1947
Description: These are two very important documents that my father used to immigrate to Canada from Belgium. In Brussels, my father arranged the necessary papers for his immigration to Canada, settling in Winnipeg, Manitoba where he had extended family.
On the left is my father’s Certificat d’Inscription au Registre des Etrangers (CIRE). This was a certificate that granted foreigners a renewable six-month residence permit. During World War II, the authorities would have stamped the document with a “J” or “Jood-Juif” identifying my father as Jewish. This document began my father’s immigration journey to Canada.
My father had received a letter telling him to go to the British Consulate on July 22nd, 1946, for documents to travel via England to Canada. On that day, a wing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem was bombed by the Irgun Zvai Le’umi. As a result, the British Consulate in Brussels was closed for the day. My father instead went to the American Embassy and subsequently travelled to Canada via New York.
The second document below is a passport from the Polish Embassy in Brussels. According to this document, my father had changed his last name from “Katz” to “Raber” as he knew that Canada would only accept Shoah survivors if a first-degree relative was their sponsor. His cousin, Wolfe Raber, from Winnipeg, claimed that Leon was his brother.
The significance of these documents is that although my father lived at 64 Rue Du Collecteur and worked in a leather factory in Brussels, he was in reality “stateless”. In fact, he was required to emigrate to secure citizenship in another country.
Voyage to Ottawa: My father, Leon Raiser Raber Z”L, arrived in Winnipeg on October 5th, 1947, with $10 in his pocket and a debt of $375 owed to the Royal Bank for his airfare to New York and the train fare to Winnipeg. He resided in Winnipeg until his death on May 27th, 2017. I found these documents in my father’s personal papers and brought them with me to Ottawa, Ontario.
Leon's 1947 Polish Passport
This passport from the Embassy of the Republic of Poland in Brussels (Konsulat Polski Brukseli) was issued to my father on April 25th, 1947. Pages 20-23 are titled, “Wizy – Visas”. These pages record my father’s intention to emigrate from Belgium to Canada. Page 23 is stamped with his entry to New York on October 2nd, 1947.
