Yael: When people found out who they were, there were a lot of parents who didn’t want their kids socializing with them, and they got beaten up. And then they were moved from place to place, ultimately living with Ann and Abel, taking the name Meeropol.
Schwab: Hi Nerd Nation, it’s Schwab and Yael, hosts of the award-winning Jewish History Nerds from Unpacked. We’re releasing another outtake while we put the finishing touches on our next season.
Schwab: There was one really interesting and emotional thread that we had to trim from the episode, the story of the Rosenbergs’ sons, Michael and Robert. After their parents were executed, the boys were bounced between relatives and temporary homes.
Yael: Our episode on Julius and Ethel Rosenberg explored the Jewish community’s deeply conflicted reaction to their execution for espionage on June 19, 1953, a Friday night of all times. If you haven’t heard it, it’s in the show notes.
Schwab: There was one really interesting and emotional thread that we had to trim from the episode, the story of the Rosenbergs’ sons, Michael and Robert. After their parents were executed, the boys were bounced between relatives and temporary homes. Eventually they were adopted by a Jewish couple, Abel and Anne Meeropol, and the boys took Meeropol as their last name.
Yael: After you’ve listened, we’d love your reaction. Should the fact that two young boys would be left as orphans have factored into Judge Kaufman’s sentencing decision? This is something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately, as I just saw the really interesting and thought-provoking documentary about Elizabeth Holmes. And my big takeaway was that the victims of all of this, regardless of what you think of her, are her two young children.
Schwab: What a thought-provoking, interesting movie. Leave us a comment or record a short video or audio message. Here’s that segment now.
Yael: Saul Feinberg was really like the leader with the pitchfork who wanted to show, I guess, as the head of the American Jewish community, like, America, we’re with you. Get these godless commies out of here.
So I don’t know if Saul Feinberg was just like a mini Joe McCarthy or if he was really worried about the anti-Semitism that would happen.
Schwab: Whoa. Mm-hmm.
Schwab: Mm-hmm.
Yael: …if people didn’t believe that the Jewish community was against communism, but he was very active in his anti-Rosenberg stance.
Schwab: Mm-hmm.
Yael: And he wrote that the case may be over, the evil that they did is endless. And now I want to talk a little bit about the children. Feinberg argued that the children should not be left with Sophie Rosenberg because Sophie Rosenberg was letting the kids associate with friends of Julius and Ethel.
Schwab: Mm-hmm.
Yael: And Michael Meeropol writes in the book that came out in the 70s that he thinks Saul Feinberg tried to kill his parents again by advocating that the children not be able to live with Abel and Ann Meeropol. Ann Meeropol was someone who I think worked in Manny Block’s office or for a friend of Manny Block, and I believe had had some fertility troubles, and someone suggested that Ann and Abel — I believe Abel was a teacher — would be like the perfect fit.
And it does seem like they were wonderful parents. Robert and Michael took their name and to this day use their name. And I watched a documentary made by Ivy Meeropol, who’s Michael’s daughter, called Heir to an Execution, where she talks about what it is like being the heir to all of this baggage.
Schwab: Yeah. I imagine that that’s part of why they take the name also. No one — when you’re Michael Meeropol, no one says, of the who are your parents?
Yael: Well, in the immediate aftermath of the arrest, they went from Tessie Greenglass to a Jewish — for lack of better words — orphanage in the Bronx, and then to live with, I believe, a family called the Blocks in Toms River, New Jersey, who are also ideological friends of Julius and Ethel. And then the principal of the school in Toms River doesn’t want them and says that because they’re not residents of the state of New Jersey, they can’t go to public school here. So they get kicked out and they have to go back to another Jewish home, a different one than the first one. And this one was apparently really bad. And apparently Saul Feinberg was advocating for them to stay there until a suitable placement could be made.
And it was an Irish judge actually who released them and allowed them to be released to the custody of Sophie Rosenberg, who was old and ill. The fact that she was ill is the real reason why they had to first go live with Tessie Greenglass, because the Greenglasses completely sided with David, again, who perjured himself to save his wife. And the Rosenberg family was much more supportive.
Schwab: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah.
Yael: Nobody from the Greenglass family went to the funeral. But there is video of Sophie Rosenberg wailing at the funeral. I know I’m all over the place, guys, but there’s so much here. They’re executed in the electric chair, the first on a Friday night. The first two or three Jewish cemeteries that are approached refuse to take them. And they are ultimately buried in Wellwood Cemetery in Babylon, Long Island.
Yael: Ivy Meeropol in her documentary tries to go see their tombstones and the people in the office at the cemetery don’t want to give her the information. And she kind of has to wander around, and they do ultimately stumble upon it. And you see there’s Hebrew on their tombstones. It says “Etol bat rav barach” and “Yona ben” — I don’t remember what Harry’s name was, probably Svi Hersch or something like that. But I did wonder, and I never found information about this, like, was there a Chevra Kadisha involved? Like, I’m very curious. Yeah, I’m very curious. Like, Rabbi Koslow — Rabbi Koslow was certainly involved. So I don’t know the extent of his involvement. But they were ultimately buried in this cemetery in Long Island, a regular Jewish cemetery. The Greenglasses had no part in it.
Schwab: Who picks up the body from the electric chair?
Yael: The reason why they couldn’t stay with Sophie Rosenberg — who, by the way, lived on Laurel Hill Terrace in Washington Heights, New York.
Schwab: Laurel Hill Terrace. I’m recording basically on Laurel Hill Terrace right now. Wow. It’s not a very big street. So like there’s only 10 buildings.
Yael: That’s — and the boys went to — the boys went to live with her on Laurel Hill Terrace, and as you said, when people found out who they were, there were a lot of parents who didn’t want their kids socializing with them, and they got beaten up. And then they were moved from place to place, ultimately living with Ann and Abel, taking the name Meeropol.
Schwab: Mm-hmm.
Yael: They were both bar mitzvahed, both boys. And Abel and Ann weren’t particularly observant, but the Irish judge who released the boys to the custody of Sophie Rosenberg asked her, are you a religious woman? And she said yes, she was a religious woman. And there was some sort of issue — they were going to release the boys to her on a Saturday, and Saul Feinberg, who again wanted to keep these boys from Sophie Rosenberg, said, you can’t bring them down from the country — I think this was up in Pleasantville somewhere, like Rockland County, Orange County — you can’t bring them down on Saturday. And the Irish judge asked — I think his name was Collins — asked Mrs. Rosenberg, are you a religious woman? She said yes. And they said, can you bring the boys down on Saturday? And she said yes. She said, yes, you can bring them down to me on Saturday. And he…
Schwab: And they were like, and do you think, in your opinion, as a Jew, can you execute someone on the Shabbat?
Yael: On the Sabbath. But he also said to her — and I read this somewhere as being like an actual legal mandate, but when I read the Meeropol book, it seemed more like advice — the Irish judge said to Mrs. Rosenberg, you know, educate the boys in your religion, like keep religion alive for them, keep your peoplehood alive for them. And so the boys were sent to Hebrew school when they lived in Toms River.
Schwab: Mm-hmm.
Yael: With the Blocks at first. Also, they said they went to a shul. He uses the word shul. Michael Meeropol wrote in his book, he spells out brachos, B-R-U-C-H-O-S, that Tessie Greenglass would have been happy that he was saying brachos in the orphanage. So they’re both bar mitzvahed. Michael found more meaning in religion than Robbie did, though there are all these articles in federation and Jewish newspapers from — I don’t know if it was the early 2000s — Robbie Meeropol comes back to religion later on in life and he puts on tefillin for the first time, I think at age 71. They call it his bar mitzvah, but he did actually have a bar mitzvah with the Meeropols. And I guess their involvement drops off after that. But…
Schwab: Hmm. Hmm. Wow.
Yael: They — the boys are — again, like the thing about reading the letters and the boys’ recollections is that — and again, not relitigating, and not saying they’re innocent or guilty, completely take the crime out of it — this is like a very normal New York Jewish family. And for me, as someone who — I don’t want to go out on a limb and say “very normal” — as someone who grew up in a…
Schwab: Very normal New York Jewish family.
Yael: You know, depends. You haven’t met my relatives.
Schwab: Mm-hmm. That’s a very key part of being a normal New York Jewish family, right? Is that like, yeah, someone seeing a therapist, right? As we know from the Rosenbergs.
Yael: …is being a dysfunctional New York Jewish family. Right, Rosenberg. So as someone who grew up in a very similar manner and knows so many people, I know probably people who know them or knew them. Like, that was the part that I was really drawn to because…
Schwab: Mm-hmm.
Yael: As I was preparing for this podcast — this is Jewish History Nerds and I wanted to focus on the Jewish element of it — what was the Jewish element of their lives? What was the Jewish communal response? I’m trying to see if there’s anything else from the Jewish communal response that I think is notable.
Schwab: Which I assume this is the case — is in the 70 years since this has happened, it is tempered. These are not people that like we as people who grew up in the New York institutional Jewish system — nobody’s like, “And here are terrible Jewish villains whose names we have to disown.” But they’re right. We’re not, but they’re not martyrs. They’re not heroes, but they’re not. Yeah.
Yael: But we certainly don’t talk about them. We don’t talk about them as Jewish martyrs. And when we learn about them — or at least for me in Jewish day school, and we learn about the Red Scare — we don’t dwell on the fact that they’re Jewish. I mean, it might be noted, but we don’t talk about this as being an episode of oppression of Jews. Because I think, as you said, people want no part of this. We would just rather not…
Yael: …talk about it. There were three rabbis who I think tried to see Eisenhower or wrote to Eisenhower, who were advocates for the Rosenbergs. Again, not necessarily that they were innocent, but that they shouldn’t be executed.
Schwab: …just like clemency, just so like, you know, hey, they did something wrong, but maybe let’s not put them to death.
Yael: Yeah, and the rest of institutional Jewry kind of cast these three people as, you know, lefty menaces. Abraham Kronbach, who was a reform rabbi in Cincinnati, who was the leader of this group, officiated the funeral. The Jewish Daily Forward, for instance, which was always a left-leaning Jewish institution…
Schwab: Radical leftists, yeah.
Yael: …also, to the extent it took a stance on this, advocated for a jail sentence rather than execution. They thought the sentence of execution was too extreme. And then I guess you also have the people who say maybe the conviction wasn’t anti-Semitism, but the sentence was anti-Semitism.
Again, the sentence was handed down by a Jewish judge with institutional ties. That being said, Judge Kaufman also had seen the Venona cables, which nobody else had seen. This is going back to the beginning, but I just want to point it out. In the cables, David, his wife Ruth, and Julius all had code names, and Ethel did not.
Schwab: Mm-hmm. Which is like — so she’s not a — yeah, she’s not a player in this story.
Yael: She’s really like — that seems to indicate that she’s there physically, but she is not — if she were a spy, she would have a code name because all of the other spies have code names. And again, I’m really not here to relitigate this, but those are all sort of things that have come out lately and have led to the Meeropol children trying to get…
Yael: …her name rehabilitated. They focus less on Julius’s name now, though for many, until the 1990s — and I read this article in a very left-leaning Jewish publication — until the 90s, the word of the Jewish left was, they are both innocent. Since then, it has become, Ethel is innocent. But they were a team, like a real team.
Schwab: Yeah, like that’s what’s so strange — that is like knowing, okay, if we know the facts of the case that Ethel was innocent, why didn’t she say that?
Yael: There’s one letter where Julius writes that he’s kvelling from something that Ethel did, which I thought was — they write about each other in really romantic terms. There’s also, you know, there’s some allusion to like their physical relationship also in the letters and how, you know, they were able to see each other occasionally for that reason.
And were they passing secrets at that time? Were they not passing secrets at that time? Did they talk about how their children would survive without them? Their wills left the children to Manny Block, their defense attorney, as a guardian. I don’t think that they intended that the children would live with Manny, but maybe that he would arrange for their caretaking.
But Manny ultimately dies suddenly, which is why they are shuttled from place to place. Within the Jewish institutional social service system, like every social service that they receive comes from the Jewish community. So these boys are not abandoned per se by the institutional Jewish community. But the reaction, you know…
There’s nobody coming out and saying these boys are innocent victims in all of this. In fact…
Schwab: Mm-hmm. But also no one coming out and saying like they need to be completely cast out and like we can’t have anything to do with that. Like maybe we don’t want them in this place or that place, but nobody’s saying like these aren’t Jews, they’re totally not part of our community.
Yael: And nobody, it seems to me, is saying our Jewish values tell us to behave one way or another way, because I think the community is so split. And if I can make one sweeping generalization, it’s that…
Schwab: Mm.
Yael: Jews in the 1950s in the United States by and large are living the best life that Jews had lived in history up until that point. Literally, for the entirety of history, there is…
Schwab: Mm-hmm. And especially probably are keenly aware of that given that it’s like a decade since, yeah, yeah.
Yael: Right, because it was such a stark contrast to how they were living 15 years earlier. And they didn’t want to mess with that.
Yael: But this was certainly the beginning of the golden age of American Jewry. To the extent that you had federal judges making these decisions who were Jews.
Schwab: Yeah.
Yael: Roy Cohn — the prosecutor Irving Saypol was a Jew. Roy Cohn was a Jew. And then Roy Cohn goes on to spearhead an entire — I don’t want to call it legislative because there wasn’t really anything legislative about it — but like this entire legislative agenda of the Senate for years and years. So they didn’t know what to do. They weren’t sure. Like, do we speak out for these people or do we let them take the…
Schwab: Right. And just like, is this a threat? Yeah. Right. It’s interesting. Just like, yeah, like — what is…
Yael: …fall for the rest of us, because all of a sudden we’re in a place where not everyone — they’re not trying to kill all of us. They’re only trying to kill two of us. And…
Schwab: Interesting. I imagine this question of like — one, do we as Jews feel secure enough as Americans, like accepted enough as Americans, that we can express concern? Or do we feel insecure enough that we need to very quickly assert, you know, our opposition? And it sounds like that question is like unresolved. Right. Just, you know…
Yael: I don’t think we ever feel secure.
Yael: There was a tremendous amount of anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union. So these people that the Rosenbergs were accused of abetting were killing thousands and thousands of Jews in the 1950s. So…
Schwab: Mm-hmm.
Yael: Well, and that’s what was also very complicated about being a communist, particularly a communist Jew in the United States in the late 30s, early 40s, because Stalin started as an ally of Hitler and then became an ally of the United States. So Saul Feinberg and institutional Judaism in the United States had that on their side as well. How could this be anti-Semitism when it’s about prosecuting people who are helping Stalin, when Stalin is killing thousands of Jews?
Schwab: Was never an ally of the Jews. Yeah.
Schwab: Right.
Yael: I think I might have mentioned this, but just in case, even the ACLU won’t get involved, and that’s how you know that people aren’t being persecuted for their religion. It’s like, when it’s helpful to us, I’ll invoke the ACLU. When it’s not helpful to us, I will not. But anyway, I could talk about this forever, and I know we’ve already gone over time.
And again, please nobody walk away from this thinking that I have a view on what really happened, because I don’t. And I’m just going to say it again — and I think maybe I’m protesting too much — I’m not really getting this, and I don’t know how I would have reacted if I had been there. I don’t know if I — I probably would have been in a position where I wouldn’t have been able to make up my mind. But I have had a tremendous amount of sympathy for those two little boys. Again, not a reason to convict or not convict a criminal, but there is a human cost to every proceeding, and it is very sad. Like what the little boys went through is really heartbreaking.
Yael: There’s a lot to unpack there. The Irish judge who asked Sophie Rosenberg if she was a religious woman, the boys eventually finding their way to a Jewish home, getting bar mitzvahed, and carrying a name into the world that wasn’t Rosenberg or Greenglass?
Schwab: And the Venona cables? I forgot how rich this episode was. Every spy had a code name, but Ethel didn’t.
We really want to hear from you on this one. Should those two boys have been a factor in the sentencing? What do you make of the Jewish community’s response then and now?