`EPILOGUE`

On Sunday morning, June 21, 1953, about 8,000 mourners gathered for Ethel and Julius’s funeral. They crowded Brooklyn’s Church Avenue near the I. J. Morris Funeral Home to get a view of the side-by-side open coffins, Ethel and Julius draped in the traditional shrouds dictated by the Jewish faith. Following the service, mourners filled three chartered buses and hundreds of private cars to follow the hearse to Wellwood Cemetery on Long Island. Graveside, Manny Bloch delivered the eulogy. He said, “I place the murder of the Rosenbergs at the door of President Eisenhower, Mr. Brownell [the attorney general], and J. Edgar Hoover. They did not pull the switch, true, but they directed the one who did pull the switch. This was not the American tradition, not American justice and not American fair play.” A cantor chanted the Kaddish, the prayer for the dead. Sophie Rosenberg sobbed, but no one from the Greenglass family attended.

The Daily Worker and the Communist Party became involved with the Rosenberg case at the end of 1952. After the couple’s deaths, the party’s Central Committee published a front-page statement, calling the Rosenberg execution “a brutal act of fascist violence.” Ethel and Julius had become martyrs.

The National Committee to Secure Justice in the Rosenberg Case resolved to keep up the fight. One of its goals was to raise $50,000 for a trust fund for the Rosenberg sons. In accordance with their parents’ wishes, Michael and Robby were placed in the care of Manny Bloch. He wanted to find them a permanent home outside the public eye. In Toms River, New Jersey, living with their parents’ friends, Ben and Sonia Bach, the boys had already faced discrimination by the school board and they were harangued by paparazzi. Bloch received many offers of adoption for the boys, but he chose Abel and Anne Meeropol. Abel was a noted songwriter who wrote under the name Lewis Allan, and Anne was an elementary school teacher. The boys moved into their Riverside Drive, Manhattan apartment at the beginning of 1954. But before he’d completed all the paperwork to give the Meeropols official guardianship, Manny died of a heart attack at the end of January 1954. As Michael and Robby told news reporter Anderson Cooper in 2017, the Meeropols saved their lives. The Jewish Board of Guardians and the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children worked within the legal system to pull the boys away from the Meeropols. They claimed Abel and Anne were not the boys’ legal guardians and that the couple were exploiting the boys politically. Michael and Robby were placed once again in a children’s shelter. A New York State Supreme Court Justice placed them in the custody of Sophie Rosenberg in February 1954. In April of that year, the surrogate of New York County appointed Sophie and Kenneth Johnson, Dean of the New School of Social Work, as co-guardians, but by September, the boys moved in permanently with Anne and Abel Meeropol, who legally adopted them in 1957. Michael and Robert Rosenberg officially become Michael and Robert Meeropol, but their biological parents never left their minds. As an adult, Robby Meeropol remained intrigued by people who said they knew his parents. He wanted to know how they sounded when they talked and laughed. Some remembered, but most didn’t.

Not long after the execution, Michael received a postcard: “Of course you feel for the loss of your parents, but when you think of all the boys killed in Korea, you must realize justice was done. Why don’t you change your names and become Christians?” It was the kind of message that now, sixty years later, he is unable to forget. Even with a new surname, Michael and Robby could not escape their legacy. They acted as two against the world. While at first maintaining silence about being Julius and Ethel’s children, they eventually embraced their heritage in 1973 and have devoted their lives to correcting the historical record about their parents. They fought for the truth through the Freedom of Information Act, causing the FBI alone to release some 160,000 pages. The fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 opened up KGB archives and previously classified and encoded documents. That and newly released grand jury testimony continued to keep the case in the limelight even sixty years later. David admitted that during the trial he and Ruth committed perjury—they had been instructed to do so by one of the prosecuting attorneys, Roy Cohn, who later became the right-hand man to anti-Communist crusader Senator McCarthy. David Greenglass also admitted Ruth, not Ethel, had typed his notes. He sent his sister to her death to save his wife, but he maintained that had Ethel and Julius pleaded guilty, they could have lived. He believed they acted out of stupidity.

Armed with additional grand jury testimony and more research, the Meeropols concluded that David and Ruth purposely framed Ethel and Julius to save themselves. The September 1945 meeting never happened. What was most surprising was that after the Signal Corps fired Julius, the KGB dropped him too. The Jell-O box may not have happened, but if it did, Ruth was the one to create its use as a recognition signal after the KGB suspended Julius. After February 25, 1945, it was Ruth who picked up his tasks. The government never really had a case. And Judge Kaufman collaborated with the prosecution, so a fair trial was never a possibility.

David Greenglass served only a fraction of his fifteen-year sentence. He died of Alzheimer’s disease in 2014 and even his New York Times obituary said he lied on the witness stand. Robby Meeropol says, “The Greenglasses were actually worse than we thought. And they weren’t just frightened, scared people. They were active connivers who enthusiastically participated in this and then pretended that they were put up to it by someone else.” Greenglass admitted to 60 Minutes television news show reporters that he sent Ethel to the electric chair, because she was less important to him than his wife and family.

In the end, Julius was indeed a Soviet spy, but he did not deliver atomic bomb secrets to the Soviets. His broad spy network stole and passed along information about jet fighters, radar, and detonators. His value to the Soviets lay in his ability to recruit and organize.

Ethel, however, was never a spy. In September 2015, the Meeropol brothers asked President Obama to exonerate Ethel. That same month, New York City Council members issued a proclamation that claimed the government wrongfully executed Ethel Rosenberg. On her 100th birthday, the council and Manhattan borough president Gale Brewer honored her. Brewer named September 28, 2015, as the “Ethel Rosenberg Day of Justice in the Borough of Manhattan.”

Michael Meeropol became a professor of economics at Western New England University. Robby Meeropol became a lawyer and then founded the Rosenberg Fund for Children to help children in similar circumstances. With this nonprofit, he has found a way to channel his emotions about his parents and their execution into something positive. He has worked to rid the American justice system of the death penalty. Each believes the other had it harder following the death of their parents. Michael believes Robby had a harder time, because he only had three years with their parents; Robby believes Michael had it tougher because he bore the brunt of responsibility and he understood more. But both are committed to their parents, and so are their children.

Michael’s daughter filmed a documentary in response to her own curiosity. Robby’s older daughter now runs the Rosenberg Fund and his younger daughter is a senior staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights. Michael and Robby have published several books of their memories and an edited volume of Ethel and Julius’s letters. They find it ironic that people can find them more easily with the last name of Meeropol than with Rosenberg, a much more common surname.

As Robby Meeropol writes, “I am proud of my parents even if they may not have been unequivocally innocent. They acted with integrity, courage, and in furtherance of righteous ideals.”

It is clear today that the Rosenbergs did not receive a fair trial. Most importantly, Ethel and Julius knew that and fought hard for their innocence. It is also clear Ethel and Julius shared limitless love for each other and their sons. He was a charismatic political leader, full of energy and smiles. She was bright, articulate, and had high ideals that she held to, whether about parenting or the Communist cause. She was full of hugs and kisses. Robby Meeropol concludes, “They were neither heroes nor demons. They were people trying to make their way and live consistently with their values. They engaged in high-risk political resistance.” In one of his last letters, Julius wrote, “My sweet, I can’t help admiring you and telling you over and over again that you are a great noble woman—which in fact you are—and certainly a very charming person at that. I guess it will not be amiss if I say I love you most dearly.”