Letter requesting release from marriage obligation (chalitzah), written by a Holocaust survivor at the St. Ottilien displaced persons camp.

One letter, handwritten, 5 pages, dated 26 May 1946, from Sara Rudney, writing from the St. Ottilien displaced persons camp, to her brother-in-law, Saul Rudney, presumably in Baltimore, Maryland, asking from release from her halakhic obligations to marry him after the death of her husband during the Holocaust. In the letter, Sara Rudney describes the circumstances of the death of her husband, Moishe, at the age of 36 on 31 December 1944, in the Landsberg concentration camp, and notes that her rabbi has instructed her to obtain chalitzah from her brother-in-law. She mentions the loss of most of her family in the Holocaust, alludes to having been confined in the Kaunas ghetto during the war, and asks her brother-in-law whether he still has her school diploma that she had sent him several years earlier, as she will need that to resume a teaching career in Palestine, where she plans to immigrate.