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.Last year we celebrated the RFC’s 25th anniversary, but another significant milestone passed without fanfare: 20 years of our prison visit grants.
We began making these grants in 1995. In the first 10 years, we awarded a total of just over $87,000 from this program (later named the Attica Fund Prison Visit Program in honor of generous gifts from a survivor of the Attica uprising, and several of the attorneys who won a settlement for the victims). In the last decade, we awarded more than twice that amount, bringing the total for these grants to over a quarter million dollars!
In the fall of 2015 four new families received their first RFC grants. Including the seven new recipients in the spring, almost a dozen families and targeted activist youth joined the RFC community last year. With the $370,000 we awarded in 2015, our total granted since our founding has reached almost $6 million!
The new beneficiaries include:
The Rosenberg Fund for Children turned 25 this year. The success of this organization, which my father created from the nightmare he experienced as a child, would not have been possible without the thousands of individuals committed to supporting the children of targeted activists. I am honored by the trust my father has placed in me to carry forward his and my grandparents’ legacy, and am profoundly grateful for the opportunity to stand with our beneficiaries. But I am also concerned.
This is the sixth and final blog in this series which uses "Unknown Secrets," a collage by Martha Rosler*, as an organizing principle to explore how the popular press, the prosecution, the defense, supporters, anti-Semitism, politicians, and the highly charged political and cultural climate influenced how people perceived my grandmother, Ethel Rosenberg, then and now.
This is my fifth blog in a series which uses "Unknown Secrets," a collage by Martha Rosler, as an organizing principle to explore how the popular press, the prosecution, the defense, supporters, politicians, and the highly charged political and cultural climate influenced how people perceived my grandmother, Ethel Rosenberg, then and now.