“I grew up thinking my parents were murdered by the US government,” says Robert Meeropol from his Springfield office. You may not recognize Robert’s last name, but you’ve probably heard of his father and mother. In 1953, when Meeropol was six years old, his parents, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, were executed by the US government after being convicted of selling nuclear secrets to the Soviets. He and his brother, Michael (they both later took the surname of their adoptive parents), are — as far as anyone knows — the only two Americans to lose both parents to capital punishment.

At first, Meeropol harbored a violent hatred for the government officials who deprived him of his parents. “If I could have had them executed ... I would have,” he says. Only later did he come to realize that “the one thing that executions produce are more victims.”

“We all have terrible things that happen to us,” he explains. “The desire for revenge is only natural, and it’s healthy that one seeks to reassert some control.” But rather than settling for the “destructive impulse” that the death penalty represents, he says, “there are ways that you can channel that revenge energy into something constructive.”

That was his thinking when he established the Rosenberg Fund for Children in 1990. With more than 8500 supporters, the group has an endowment of $1.25 million and last year distributed nearly $200,000 in grants to hundreds of children. The money helped pay for books, tuition, and travel for kids whose parents have “lost a job, suffered physical injury or mental disability, been harassed or discriminated against, been imprisoned, or died” because of their activism. Next year the fund expects to hand out even more. “The Rosenberg Fund is my effort to help those who have been targeted,” Meeropol says, to “try to transform the destruction visited on my family into something constructive for others.”

Although he clearly has his work cut out for him if he hopes to abolish the death penalty, Meeropol has been heartened by the “fundamental change in the public’s attitude toward capital punishment.” More and more people are realizing that the system is, as he puts it, “fatally flawed.”

“Capital punishment requires perfection,” he says. “Because of the impossibility of human beings’ creating perfection, innocent people will be executed.” He illustrates this by pointing to his parents’ trial, which he says was hopelessly marred by anti-Semitism and the virulent anti-communism of the McCarthy era. He also looks to a more recent case.

“You’d think that the perfection argument doesn’t apply in the McVeigh case,” he says. “We know he’s guilty. And he was provided with an excellent defense. But then we find out that massive amounts of material were not turned over to the defense. If the system can goof up in this situation, what does that tell us about cases where there’s much less publicity, or cases where there’s much greater controversy and there’s a much greater stake in covering up the facts? If they can goof it up in this circumstance, you can bet they’ll goof it up in those. This is proof positive of the imperfection of the death penalty.”

Meeropol will speak in Boston twice in upcoming weeks. On June 7, he will speak at Boston College at the first national gathering of the anti-death-penalty group Murder Victims’ Families for Reconciliation, where he’ll give a speech titled “Families of the Executed: The Invisible Victims” as part of the gathering’s “Healing the Wounds of Murder” conference. The event also features Dead Man Walking author Sister Helen Prejean and music by Steve Earle. On June 17, on the 48th anniversary of his parents’ death, Meeropol visits the Community Church of Boston, where he’ll explain the seemingly contradictory term “constructive revenge.”

For more information about the June 7 Boston College event, call (617) 868-0007 or visit www.mvfr.org. The Community Church of Boston is located at 565 Boylston Street, Boston; for more information about the June 17 event, call (617) 266-6710. Contact the Rosenberg Fund for Children online at www.rfc.org, or call (413) 739-9020.

Issue Date: May 31 - June 7, 2001