Born in Austrian Galicia in 1881, Israel Zolli (né Zoller) studied at the rabbinical seminary in Florence and later served as the rabbi of Trieste and then Rome. Although he authored a scholarly study of the New Testament, published in 1938, few of his congregants expected that he, along with his wife, would convert to Catholicism less than a decade later. Shalom Goldman writes:
Italian Jews had faced official discrimination beginning in 1938, but they were not threatened with extermination until German forces moved into Italy after Mussolini’s fall in 1943. When the Nazis [seized] Rome, Zolli and his family went into hiding with a Catholic family. The presidents of the synagogue and the community, however, expected Zolli to remain in public view, and they criticized the rabbi for shirking his leadership role. Zolli responded with the assertion that the Germans certainly would have killed him as soon as they found him, just as they had systematically killed the chief rabbis of other Italian cities. Regardless of the dangers Zolli and his family may have faced during the war, Zolli’s postwar critics considered his apostasy to be an act of retribution against a community that had criticized his behavior during the German occupation.
Read more on Tablet: http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-life-and-religion/196727/the-apostasy-of-rabbi-zolli