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From the Executive Director

From the Executive Director
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.
 
 

I spent the 59th anniversary of my parents’ execution speaking at Midrash, a progressive Jewish cultural center in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. I arrived in Rio on Sunday morning after an overnight flight from New York. My first presentation was not until Monday evening, but after resting on Sunday afternoon, I spent most of the next day doing television and newspaper interviews. On Monday I spoke following a showing of Sidney Lumet’s film, Daniel.

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.

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.