Our results provide a first step to make rigorous the formal analysis in terms of 1 c 2 proposed by Chandrasekhar [2], [3], motivated by the methods of Einstein, Infeld and Hoffmann, see Thorne [34]. We consider the non-relativistic limit for the local smooth solutions to the free boundary value problem of the cylindrically symmetric relativistic Euler equations, when the mass energy density includes the vacuum states at the free boundary. For large enough (rescaled) speed of light c and suitably small time T, we obtain uniform, with respect to c, "a priori"estimates for the local smooth solutions. Moreover, the smooth solutions of the cylindrically symmetric relativistic Euler equations converge to the solutions of the classical compressible Euler equation, at the rate of order 1 c 2 .