Jennifer Meeropol is the granddaughter of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg and the daughter of RFC Founder, Robert Meeropol. Jenn became the Executive Director of the RFC on September 1, 2013. Prior posts on this page were written by Robert (unless otherwise noted), and represent his opinions, which are not necessarily shared by the RFC.Last year we celebrated the RFC’s 25th anniversary, but another significant milestone passed without fanfare: 20 years of our prison visit grants.
We began making these grants in 1995. In the first 10 years, we awarded a total of just over $87,000 from this program (later named the Attica Fund Prison Visit Program in honor of generous gifts from a survivor of the Attica uprising, and several of the attorneys who won a settlement for the victims). In the last decade, we awarded more than twice that amount, bringing the total for these grants to over a quarter million dollars!
Some of my happiest childhood memories are from the time I spent at Camp Kinderland. Despite an initial bout of homesickness my first summer, I soon felt like I had been part of the Kinderland community for years. Bunks and buildings were named after radical heroes I recognized from family discussions and Seders. I lived in Harriet Tubman, Emma Lazarus, and Ernestine Rose cabins, danced in the Paul Robeson theatre and played ultimate frisbee by the Roberto Clemente sports hut.
Guest blog by Robert Meeropol, Rosenberg Fund for Children Founder & son of Ethel & Julius Rosenberg
It has been a year since the release of David Greenglass’s grand jury testimony in which he denied my mother, Ethel Rosenberg’s, involvement in espionage. This was the final element necessary for me to pursue a plan I’d thought about for decades.
Today is the anniversary of my grandparents’ executions. As it approached, I prepared the statement below reflecting on the date’s significance. Many members of the Rosenberg Fund for Children network have firsthand memories of the grief and fear the executions elicited among left-wing progressives at the time – a community that felt very much under attack in that moment in history. Sixty three years later I still hear from people who were shaken to their core, but whose response was to resist the repression they were experiencing.
Guest blog by Robert Meeropol, Rosenberg Fund for Children Founder & son of Ethel & Julius Rosenberg (originally published on Robert's blog, Still Out on a Limb)
Most of you probably know about D.W. Griffith’s horrible 1915 film, The Birth of a Nation. It glorified the Ku Klux Klan. President Woodrow Wilson, a virulent racist, showed it in the White House.