Guest Blog by RFC Founder Robert Meeropol

Earlier this month we lost a major figure in the Rosenberg Case struggle when David Alman died at the age of 102. In 1951, he and his wife, Emily Alman, were cofounders of the National Committee to Secure Justice in the Rosenberg Case. Dave wrote decades later that the few who formed the original core of the Committee weren’t the best people to do it, but there was no one else.

Emily died in 2004, at age 86, after a successful career as a sociologist and lawyer. Dave was a novelist, businessman, farmer and social activist. In 2010 Dave finished the book the two of them had been working on entitled, "Exoneration: The Rosenberg-Sobell Case in the 21st Century." It is the inside story of those on the front lines battling to save my parents’ lives at the height of the McCarthy era hysteria.

Dave never gave up fighting for the truth about my parents’ case. He was there in the 1950’s, and twenty years later when we founded the National Committee to Reopen the Rosenberg Case. This century, we worked together on the effort that led to the Exonerate Ethel Campaign in 2016. David was fond of saying, “I wish I still had the energy I had when I was young... only 80.” He was boundlessly optimistic. He told me at age 100, in the midst of the Trump darkness, that he still expected to see my mother exonerated. I regret that he didn’t live to get his wish, but his death has fortified my desire to re-initiate that effort.

I was too young to remember the first time I met Dave and Emily, but by the time I was five years old they were two of my favorite people. They were some of my brother’s and my principal protectors during those nightmarish times between our parents' arrestparents arrest in 1950 and our adoption by Abel and Anne Meeropol in 1954. And it didn’t end then. I have many meaningful memories of visiting their farm in East Brunswick, NJ, as a teenager and their farm near Saratoga Springs, NY, decades later.

It is hard for me to express the depth of emotion Dave’s passing has sparked. He was one of the most important figures of my childhood, which as I have aged has come to feel like ancient history. Fortunately, Dave and Emily left us with Exoneration. We can recapture some of that history and a sense of the remarkable people Dave and Emily were by reading it. And we can honor his memory by working to finally exonerate my mother.

Photo: From The David and Emily Alman Collection of The Julius and Ethel Rosenberg Archive at the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center