News & Events

Grateful for Seven Dollars

In August 2017 an envelope with no return address arrived at the RFC office. Inside were two pieces of blank, lined paper and seven $1 bills. There was no note or identifying information other than a postmark from Greensboro, NC. I recorded the donation as an anonymous contribution and didn’t think much more about it.

The next month, I received another donation: same envelope, same blank, lined paper, same seven $1 bills, no additional information. The same thing happened each month through the end of the year and continued into 2018. Since then, similar envelopes with seven $1 bills arrive irregularly; sometimes it’s several months in a row, sometimes half a year will pass without one.

Anonymous contributions are not unheard of at the RFC, but I don’t remember any other instance of ongoing contributions without any additional information. The writing on the envelopes looks the same, the postmark is always Greensboro, NC and the $1 bills are always folded in blank, lined paper. I have to assume they’re all coming from the same person.

It reminds me of stories my dad used to tell me about checks he received in the early days of the RFC for modest sums, often in somewhat odd amounts (e.g. $8.49 or $7.52). As someone who has facility with numbers and is fascinated by them (something he definitely passed on to me), he wondered about the reason behind those amounts.

After meeting a number of donors at events over the years, my dad finally figured out that many of these donations were from supporters with fixed incomes who were often quite elderly. At the end of a month, after paying their bills, they would donate what was left in their checking account to the RFC. Many included handwritten notes apologizing for not giving more and sharing how my grandparents’ trial and executions impacted their lives.

My dad always felt especially grateful for those contributions. They represented support from his parents’ generation and from people of modest means who cared enough about our work to give what they could, even though it wasn’t a lot.

I’ve thought about those early donors each time I’ve opened another anonymous $7 contribution and I’ve wondered about the motivation behind these recurring gifts. Is there a significance to the amount? Unlike the donations in multiples of $18 we often receive from Jewish supporters, I don’t know of any tradition to explain this gift. (Each letter in Hebrew has a numeric value; the letters that spell “Chai” or “life” add up to 18. It is a Jewish custom and considered good luck to give monetary gifts in multiples of 18.)

I’m still curious about why this donor chooses to remain anonymous. I wish I could ask the supporter about their gifts and thank them but I don’t know who they are. I’ve started to look for the distinctive handwriting that accompanies these donations and receiving one always makes me smile.

Maybe one day I’ll learn the story or significance behind these contributions. Until then, I’m thankful to receive them and grateful for all of you who give in ways and amounts that are meaningful for you.

I still wonder what motivated this particular supporter to make irregular anonymous donations of $7. But more than anything I’m grateful that they, and so many others, continue to support the RFC in ways, and at amounts, that are meaningful to them. I hope every supporter knows how much we appreciate their generosity and value the impact it makes for our grantees.

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Merriam Ansara (no verificado)
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Jenn, I was really moved by this account and realized that in that category of fixed income, I too could make the smallest of donations and still have it count. As processing a credit card payment would cost significantly, I think I will set up the RFC in my bank account where I usually pay my bills (for free) and then each month when I'm billing my bills, I'll be reminded and send the small amount that I think I can send that month.

As you know, I also am a person of Robbie's generation whose life was utterly altered when I was a child by my father being witchhunted out of his job first for the State Department and then for the Arab Delegation to the UN, and then blackmarked for the rest of his life. I donated to RFC when it first started and then one of the first things I did when I moved to Easthampton in 2006 was to offer to volunteer for the RFC. The volunteering didn't last long; the staff decided there was not much I could do to help. And I have not donated often enough to the RFC either as especially since retirement I am on a very fixed income.

So thank you for your email and the blog and I look forward to sending regular small checks

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Jan Whitaker (no verificado)
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So interesting! Seven has long been regarded as a lucky number. But I wouldn't expect a Rosenberg Fund supporter to be superstitious, so I wonder if it has some special, personal meaning to them. Could it be from someone the Fund helped?

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Jenn Meeropol (no verificado)
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In reply to by Jan Whitaker (no verificado)

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That's an interesting theory, Jan, it's certainly possible..... I think as much as I'm curious about the story/significance behind the donations, I also enjoy the mystery of it :)

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John B. Chadwick (no verificado)
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The reciprocal of the number 7 is :
0.142857142857142857142857142857142857142857142857142857142857142857142857...

So, perhaps the efforts to `invert´ injustice ´ are an unending task we must forever undertake?
OR, 7 represents the success of ending of injustice and now we are `whole´?

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Chip Sharpe (no verificado)
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Raised in a Christian family where I repeatedly read the New Testament, I often remembered that, in reply to a question of “How often should I forgive someone? Seven times?,
Jesus replied to him, “I do not say to you seven times, but seventy times seven.”
That left me with the impression that a gift, whether of money or of forgiveness, would be enhanced by the number 7.
I moved from Greensboro in 1971 and like trying to imagine some details of this mysterious offering. I’d love to know…

Thanks, Chip, I didn't know the connection to 7s and forgiveness from the New Testament, that's interesting..... I'm also especially intrigued by the Greensboro connection and wonder about the full story behind these gifts. Maybe some day I'll learn the whole story (and if I do, that would make a wonderful conclusion to this blog!)

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Thomas Zaslavsky (no verificado)
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For number nerds (more power to us!): The decimal expansion of 1/7 has a remarkable property. It is .142857 repeated. Notice that 14 = 2x7, 28 = 2x14, 56 = 2x28, and 2x56 = 112 which gives the next digit in 1428571... and the hundreds digit adds to 56 to make the 57 at the end of the 6-digit repeating sequence. In fact, here is 1/7 as the sum of multiplying 7 by 2/100 many times, and adding:
.14
.0028
.000056
.00000112
.0000000224
etc.
Yes, it adds up to the repeating decimal. The only other number that gives such a property is 1/3 = .333333...:
.3
.03
.003
and keep multiplying by 3/10 and adding.

This was an open problem in mathematics for years until solved by a student, Kevin Ford, in the American Mathematical Monthly of February, 1993, page 192.

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Elena Herrada (no verificado)
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I was one of the researchers on Detroit Red Squad files ( 1990-92). i read The Committee to Defend the Rosenberg’s files. They are forever in my heart.

I have no further information but my suspicion is that the contribution is related to the Greensboro Massacre in 1979 when 5 Communist Workers Party members were killed by the Klan in a death to the Klan rally where the police did nothing.

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Jenn Meeropol (no verificado)
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In reply to by Lynne (no verificado)

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Hi Lynne, one of the things I found most intriguing about the donations is the Greensboro connection. A former Board member and family friend was a survivor of the massacre (the late Dr. Marty Nathan, who lost her husband Mike Nathan in the attack); I've wondered if the donor was somehow connected to the attack. My father and Marty used to do joint presentations on how both their experiences/the attacks on their families influenced their lives and led them to start the RFC and the Greensboro Justice Fund (the archive of records of the GJF are available at http://scua.library.umass.edu/greensboro-justice-fund/), Jenn

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