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.
My book group almost exclusively reads fiction; usually political fiction, often written by women. In general, I prefer reading novels rather than non-fiction, so I was surprised by how moved I was by the first non-fiction book my group read this year: Far From the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity by Andrew Solomon (http://andrewsolomon.com/books/far-from-the-tree/).
We woke up this morning to the news that Pete Seeger had died.
My (Robert’s) first memory of Pete was seeing him and the rest of the Weavers at Carnegie Hall just before Christmas in 1955. I was eight years old. My parents, Abel and Anne Meeropol, who knew the Seegers, took me to visit them at their home in the Hudson River Valley of New York the following year.
Thanks to all who joined us on January 12, 2014, for the premiere screening of CARRY IT FORWARD: Celebrate the Children of Resistance. This 90-minute film presented a condensed version of the June 2013 theatrical event staged at Town Hall in New York City, that commemorated the 60th anniversary of Ethel and Julius Rosenbergs’ executions.
My most recent blogs have focused on possible new directions for the RFC. I also shared a lovely letter from a beneficiary family expressing their appreciation for aid for their young daughter. And they explained why, now that the crisis had passed for them, they chose to not request support this fall in the hopes that it would leave funds available for other families in more immediate need of assistance.
(This guest post by RFC founder and former executive director, Robert Meeropol, originally appeared on his Still Out on a Limb blog at www.robertmeeropol.com/blog.)
In her final hours my mother, Ethel Rosenberg, wrote, for her and Julius: “[W]e were comforted in the sure knowledge that others would carry on after us.” Many years later, these words sparked the creation of the Rosenberg Fund for Children (RFC).
Last weekend I spoke in Toronto at a reception to re-launch the Mary Pitawanakwat Fund (MPF). The MPF is similar to the Rosenberg Fund and was, for a number of years, an RFC Canadian sub-fund. Now, after being taken under the tax-exempt wing of the Toronto-based Winchevsky Centre of the United Jewish People's Order, it was finally 100% Canadian.