A 63-year-old medical professional, who has been hunting down passports and old documents for 25 years, has developed a fascinating collection that has been making waves, especially on social media.

For Ross Nochimson, a New Jersey based history enthusiast in his free time, the passion for collecting started when he was a little boy.

"I was actually at a wedding when I was 11 years old and I met a Holocaust survivor who left Germany in 1933 because he was beaten up by the Brown Shirts and immigrated to the United States," Nochimon told Daily Sabah in an exclusive interview.

"And then I started getting interested in historical items like coins and paper, money and documents," Nochimson said.

The collector, who started collecting passports in the late 1990s, said that at that time people had to pay for purchases in cash or international postal cheques, which were risky and came with no guarantee. He said he waited around five to 10 years for digital sales platforms to develop, and it became easier for him to add new finds to his collection with the ease of trading transactions.

Nochimson's collection is not limited to passports.

"I have passports from about 50 to 100 countries, but that's not the focus of my collection. It's more the historical side in terms of events like the Napoleonic Wars, the Civil War in the United States, World War I, World War II, the Cold War, those kinds of issues surrounding the documents," he noted.

Nochimson recently posted a document on Instagram that tells an intriguing story of a Jewish couple from Germany living in Cairo in the 1940s who needed to renew their passports.

"Because Germany and Britain were at war, there were no diplomatic relations between Egypt and Germany at that time. So the Swedish ligation and Cairo renewed or issued the Jewish gentleman's passport and put the red J to identify him as a Jew. While his wife, who is a gentile, is not marked that way. So, the story is that the Swedish ligation, not Germany, issued the document during wartime, which is unusual," Nochimson explained.

He obtains most of the documents either through exchange with another collector or direct purchase from an auction house and digital sales platforms. Nochimson, who isn't professionally trained in the field, is careful to handle his collections with clean hands and stores them on chemical-free archival paper in a temperature-controlled room away from sunlight.

"I have a bucket list and on it are a Canadian 1936 Vimy Pilgrimage passport, a 1962 breakaway Republic of Katanga passport and a Sovereign Order of Malta diplomatic passport," Nochimson added. "That's a short list."

Ottoman roots

Notably, Nochimson's lineage extends from the Americas to Europe and the Middle East.

"My ancestors probably came from the Middle East and migrated to Türkiye 500 years ago and lived under the Ottomans," the collector informed.

"At some point, that half of the family immigrated to Lithuania and then came to the United States. That was the journey of my father's side, so yes, my family lived in Ottoman Türkiye."

'Taking in history'

"Collecting is definitely an outlet for me to relax and sit back and take in history in a physical form, like a document," he said. "The research is interesting and can be surprising."

He's also thankful to his followers on Instagram many of whom help him unravel the details of the documents he posts which he says he could "never discover because I don't speak the original languages."

Nochimson has greater plans for the future, too.

His virtual passport museum project is still a work in progress, but he's eager to open a shop in the future to help finance his purchases.

"I would like to get more exposure for my collections and, if possible, turn my hobby into a business," he said. "But I'm not an expert in this field and if there is a good expert and reliable consultant, I would really like help with my project."