The burning and gassing and all these things, no one had an idea.

— Rabbi Mayer Relles

Biography

Mayer Relles was born in Skalat, Poland, on June 2, 1908, to a family that was beginning to shed some of the constraints of Orthodox Judaism. As a promising young Talmudic scholar, Mayer traveled to other countries when quotas were imposed upon Jews in Polish schools and was ordained in 1932.

Mayer enrolled for advanced studies at the rabbinical seminary in Rome in 1933 and moved to Venice to accept a rabbinical appointment in 1936. After the Fascist Italian government entered the war, he was arrested in June 1940, briefly interned in a concentration camp, and released a few months later. For the next three years, he worked in the Jewish community of Venice and pursued his studies in the neighboring city of Padua. In addition to his rabbinical studies, he received a Ph.D. in Italian Literature and Philosophy in 1941.

After the Germans occupied Italy in September 1943, Mayer went into hiding. He tried escaping into neutral Switzerland, but was arrested near the border. He remained incarcerated in the city of Como, Italy, until the Italian Underground helped him escape to Milan. Mayer spent several months there before successfully escaping into Switzerland in April 1944.

Rabbi Relles lived in Switzerland until September 1945, when he returned to Venice. From 1946 to 1951, he served Jewish communities in the Italian cities of Ancona and Trieste and completed his advanced rabbinical studies in Padua.

The rabbi and his wife moved to the U.S. in 1951. Rabbi Relles held teaching positions and rabbinical posts in the Chicago area and in Superior, Wisconsin. From 1971 to 1976, he returned to Italy to serve as chief rabbi of Trieste. He later served as the spiritual leader at Anshe Poale Zedek synagogue in Manitowoc, Wisconsin.

Rabbi Relles wrote a long manuscript account of his experiences in Italy during World War II and his escape to Switzerland in April 1944. It is available in the library of the Wisconsin Historical Society. Rabbi Mayer Relles died in 1995.

Pictures

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