Who is rosenberg

Browse our collection of oral histories with workers, families, service members, and more about their experiences in the Manhattan Project. Skip to main content. Ethel Greenglass Rosenberg. Consequences The Rosenberg trial increased the growing apprehension among the American public of Soviet espionage, and fueled the anti-Communist campaigns of Senator Joseph McCarthy.

Load more. Related Profiles A. Physicist, Pakistan. Alan Nunn May. The Rosenbergs, who insisted they were innocent, were found guilty. Judge Irving Kaufman carefully considered their sentence. Hoover, aware of the tenuousness of the case against Ethel, and how it would look if America executed a young mother, urged against the death sentence for her, but Cohn argued for it and won. But is that true, or just a nephew who wants to expose the people who lied about my parents?

They constantly question their own memories of the past. But is that just fantasy? Ethel has long been portrayed as a cold woman, one who, as Kaufman said in his sentencing , loved communism more than her children. In reality, as Sebba reveals in her book, she was a particularly devoted mother, with a progressive interest in child psychology.

Before her arrest, she regularly saw a child therapist, Elizabeth Phillips, for help with Michael and to learn how to be a better mother. During her three years in prison, she faithfully kept up her subscription to Parents magazine. But when she was arrested, all the aspirations she had harboured for giving her boys the kind of happy childhood that had been denied to her imploded spectacularly. At first the boys lived with her mother, Tessie, who made no secret of her resentment of the situation.

None of their many aunts or uncles would take them, either because they sided with David and Ruth, or they were scared. So they were shipped around to various families. The US government said that if Julius gave them names of other spies, and he and Ethel admitted their guilt, their lives would be spared. Ethel kept up her usual brave appearance, but on this occasion Michael — who was 10 and understood what was happening — was upset by her outward calm.

We press you close and kiss you with all our strength. Lovingly, Daddy and Mommy. They were buried on Long Island, in one of the few Jewish cemeteries that would accept their bodies. They could finally grow up in anonymity among loving people who told them their parents had been brave and admirable.

Abel Meeropol was a songwriter whose biggest hit was Strange Fruit , so the boys were raised on the royalties from the most famous song of the civil rights era. But memories of their parents were always there. Robert developed a strong physical resemblance to Ethel. The boys enjoyed a happy, academic, leftwing upbringing as Meeropols.

They told almost no one their real surname, and Robert, who was a toddler when his parents were imprisoned, never considered reverting to it. They decided to put the exposure to good use by campaigning for their parents.

But the story had only started to unfold. I n , the Venona papers were declassified. These were messages sent between Soviet intelligence agencies that had been intercepted and decrypted by US counterintelligence from to The Rosenbergs were named in them.

But there was little about Ethel. But in he finally accepted them when Morton Sobell — who had been convicted for espionage along with the Rosenbergs and served 18 years in Alcatraz — gave an interview to the New York Times.

He said that he and Julius had been spies together, and confirmed that Julius had not helped the Russians build the bomb. Michael has made peace with the revelation that his father was a spy. The Rosenbergs had two sons, Robert and Michael. By , however, the Rosenbergs dropped out of the Communist Party to pursue Julius's espionage activities. Early in , Julius was fired from his job with the Signal Corps when his past membership in the Communist Party came to light.

On June 17, , Julius Rosenberg was arrested on suspicion of espionage after having been named by Sgt. On August 11, , Ethel was arrested. The trial against the Rosenbergs began on March 6, From the beginning, the trial attracted a high amount of media attention and generated a largely polarized response from observers, some of whom believed the Rosenbergs to be clearly guilty, and others who asserted their innocence.