Rosenberg Fund For Children
The Rosenberg Fund for Children was established to provide for the educational and emotional needs of children whose parents have suffered because of their progressive activities and who, therefore, are no longer able to provide fully for their children. The RFC also provides grants for the educational and emotional needs of targeted activist youth. Professionals and institutions will be awarded grants to provide services to beneficiaries.
My father's name is Robert Meeropol, but he was born Robert Rosenberg. When he was three (photo, right), my grandparents, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were arrested and charged with giving the secret of the Atomic Bomb to the Soviet Union. When he was six, the government executed my grandparents at the height of the McCarthy era. Now, more than sixty years later, I can sense the same chill winds that wreaked havoc on his life and many others, once again sweeping our nation.
In recent years, we have witnessed the most rapid and widespread erosion of our civil liberties since the 1950s. Those who speak out in opposition to our criminal war abroad and the growing repression at home are condemned as “traitors” and treated as enemies of the state.
These conditions are familiar to anyone who lived through or heard about the anti-communist hysteria of the 1950s. After my grandparents’ arrests, my relatives were so frightened of being associated with "communist spies" that they refused to take my father into their homes. First, he lived in a shelter. Later he lived with friends of my grandparents in New Jersey, but he was thrown out of school after the Board of Education found out who he was. After my grandparents' execution, the police even seized him from the home of his future adoptive parents, and he was placed in an orphanage.
Bad as this was, it could have been much worse. As my father grew older, he came to realize the debt he owed to so many generous individuals whom he never met, but who rallied to his support. As a result of their collective efforts and generosity, he grew up in a loving household and flourished in the supportive environment provided by child-oriented progressive institutions.
In 1990 my father figured out how he could repay the community that helped him survive. He initiated the Rosenberg Fund for Children to find and help children who are enduring the same kind of nightmare he endured as a child. You may be shocked to learn that there are hundreds of children in these circumstances in this country today! Moreover, as thousands of outraged young people across the nation protest against injustice, many of these activist “children” are themselves becoming the targets of repression.