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.(guest blog by RFC Communications Director, Amber Black)
For people who have been gone for almost 65 years, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg turn up in the news and pop culture a lot…and in some surprising ways.
This summer marks my 10th year as a staff member at the Rosenberg Fund for Children. While I no longer feel like a new employee, it’s hard to believe I’ve worked here for a decade. I joined the RFC as the Granting Coordinator in 2007. I stayed in that role until the fall of 2011, when I became the Associate Director. I spent the next 18 months working closely with my father, Robert Meeropol, as he prepared to retire as Executive Director (a position he’d held since he started the organization in the fall of 1990). In September of 2013, I became the second Executive Director of the RFC.
It’s been an extraordinary year since we announced the campaign to exonerate my grandmother in our spring 2016 newsletter. The article here details the effort’s many accomplishments, including garnering petition signatures from almost 60,000 people across the country and around the world!
Around the December holidays, the campaign to exonerate my grandmother, Ethel Rosenberg, got a huge boost:
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!