Martin Rind photograph collection, approximately 1830-1969

Martin Rind was born in Seattle in 1920. His mother, Bertha Rind, born Levinson, was a native of Galesburg, Illinois and a long-time resident of Chicago. His father, Max Rind, was part of a large German-speaking Jewish family from the village of Hroby in Bohemia, a province of Austria at the time. Members of the Rind family had immigrated to the United States over the years from 1904 to 1908, settling first in Chicago, then in the Queen Anne neighborhood of Seattle. For several years, Max and his five sisters—Matilda, Elsa, Heda, Eda, and Rudla—as well as his parents, Albert and Theresa, Theresa’s widowed brother-in-law Charles Stastny, and Charles’s three children, all lived in the same house. Even when Matilda Rind married Hugo Jassny, a native of Silesia, in 1914, the couple took a house only a few blocks away. Also nearby were Theresa’s brother Albert Kohn and his wife Sophie, as well as Theresa’s sister Louise Weil, with her husband Sam and their two daughters.

After completing his schooling, Max Rind went to work in his uncle Albert Kohn’s wholesale business, the Puget Sound Merchandise Company. In the 1920s, he and his brother-in-law Hugo Jassny started a business of their own to supply casings to makers of kosher sausage, the Pacific Coast Casing Company. Over time, they extended the business into the manufacture of sausage for the wider non-kosher market. In the 1930s, Jassny sold his share of the business to the brothers Joseph and Robert Seifert, and the company was renamed the Milwaukee Sausage Company. As a young man, Martin Rind worked in the company’s retail outlet in the Pike Place Market. After graduating from the University of Washington in 1941 and serving in the US Army during the Second World War, he returned to work for the company, eventually becoming its general manager. After the death of his father in 1958, Martin bought the Seiferts’ share of the company and became its sole owner and chief executive. While running the business he started a second one, the Milwaukee Import Company, to import meat for processing. The latter became his sole business after he sold the Milwaukee Sausage Company in 1971.

In 1949, Martin married Bernice Mossafer, a Seattle native. Her parents, David and Serena Mossafer, were Sephardic Jews who had immigrated from the isle of Rhodes, at the time a part of Turkey. Martin and Bernice became leaders in support of the arts and Jewish organizations in the Seattle area, notably the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle and the Jewish Community Center. They had four children. Martin continued to run his business until ill health forced his retirement in the late 1990s. He died in 2002, Bernice in 2018. Their remains lie side by side in Hills of Eternity cemetery, on Queen Anne Hill.