I spent the 59th anniversary of my parents’ execution speaking at Midrash, a progressive Jewish cultural center in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. It was my intent to write about this trip immediately upon my return, but I’ve decided to let my reactions percolate a little longer and save them for next week’s blog.

I’m convinced that humans make a big deal out of anniversaries in multiples of 10 because we have ten fingers. The RFC is not immune to this trend. We’ve staged major programs in New York City on the 40th and 50th anniversary of my parents’ execution, and are already beginning to plan for the 60th in June 2013. But for me every anniversary is important, and whether I am marking it quietly at home or on stage before thousands, it is an emotionally laden time.

Periodically the media asks me to provide them with family photographs from before the time of my parents’ arrests. I tell them that the FBI seized all my family’s possessions when my parents were arrested including all their family snapshots, so all I have are a couple of pictures given to me later by relatives. As young adults my brother and I tried to retrieve our parents’ possessions, but were told that they had been destroyed or lost. Sometimes I imagine them stacked in a dusty corner of an impossibly large federal warehouse.

June 5th, 2012 will be the last Rosenberg Fund for Children (RFC) Board of Director’s meeting chaired by my dear friend Bob Winston. At the end of the meeting he will be stepping down as Board Chair and leaving the group after many years of valuable service to the RFC.

As I recall, it happened in the middle of an early spring night in 1967 toward the end of my sophomore year at Earlham College. The sensibilities of the 1960’s counter-culture had finally arrived on campus, and one of my classmates had let his wavy brown hair grow to shoulder length. Another group of male students, wearing white sheets and hoods, pulled the “long-hair” from his bed, carried him forcibly to a field, held him down and cut his hair.