Robert Meeropol

I can’t imagine that any of you knew when you were little children that your parents would die on a specific day, at a specific hour and minute, their lives brought to an agonizing end by the Zeus-like hand of an executioner wielding his lightening bolt of vengeance. Yet this is the story of Robert Meeropol, né Rosenberg, son of Julius and Ethel, both convicted of conspiracy to sell secrets to the Soviets. There’s more to him than that, of course, but the actions of his parents and the government define him in a unique way from which he cannot and apparently does not wish to escape. I spoke with him a couple of days after his appearance in Providence at the Jewish Community Center.

“I was raised surrounded by Jews,” he tells me. “But I was raised in the heart of Jewish culture, not religiously in the traditional sense, but in the Shalom Aleichem tradition.” Able Meeropol, his adoptive father, “used to write alternative bar/bat mitzvah services for Jews in the Mt. Vernon area.” To them, the bar mitzvah was all about a performance, so they wrote scripts and music based on Jewish history. It was in this sort of Jewish milieu that he grew up.

And yes, he had a bar mitzvah ceremony of his own, but as he tells it, the circumstances were very unusual. “After we started living with Able and Anne Meeropol we were seized by the police. The lawyer who had defended my parents died of a heart attack before he’d finished the adoption process. Other Jews wanted us removed from the Meeropol’s. Part of the eventual agreement that allowed our return was we had to be bar mitzvaed and attend synagogue.” So, he says, “I was brought up believing that I was bar mitzvaed by court order.” To this day he continues to feel most comfortable in a cultural Jewish setting.

He feels that “Jewish reaction to his parents was a sign of insecurity. People were terrified. They presumed my parents were guilty,” and that there would be a backlash. Thus the Rosenbergs were traitors to their people even more than to the United States. The odd thing is that Jews in America who had a dual loyalty, to Israel and to the US objected when the Rosenbergs’ dual loyalty was exposed. But to Meeropol his “parents dual loyalties, were of a different sort. In our country we are not steeped in class, but in national, religious etc. loyalty so when seeing my parents, people wondered if they were loyal to the US or to the USSR? They were loyal to the working class which a small portion of capitalists were exploiting. They saw themselves as helping workers by defeating the Nazis.”

His argument is that his parents, or at least his father, gave or sold information to our wartime allies against Nazi fascism, knowing that it was illegal to do so. After all, the government was shipping tons of material there in its Lend-Lease program, why not give them something else to help in the fight against Fascism. But spying for Stalin? True, the breadth and depth of his atrocities had not yet been revealed, but even by the war years his brutality should have been obvious even to casual observers, which the Rosenbergs were certainly not. And the secret to the Atom bomb? No, that information was way above Julius’ pay grade; he couldn’t have revealed what he did not know. In fact he was never formally charged with that crime, only with the more nebulous conspiracy to commit espionage. The case is still shrouded in mystery. In 2008, Morton Sobell who was tried with the Rosenbergs admitted he was a spy and confirmed Julius Rosenberg was “in a conspiracy that delivered to the Soviets classified military and industrial information and what the American government described as the secret to the atomic bomb.” But then in a letter to the New York Times he denied that he knew anything about Julius Rosenberg’s alleged atomic espionage.

In 1990 Meeropol, no doubt with his own experiences in mind, established a foundation called the Rosenberg Fund for Children, which according to its website “provides for the educational and emotional needs of both targeted activist youth and children in this country whose parents have been harassed, injured, jailed, lost jobs or died in the course of their progressive activities. In its 19-year history, the Fund has awarded more than $3 million in grants to benefit hundreds of children.”