Biography
Grew up in a poor Jewish tenement family on Manhattan's Lower East Side; labor activist and aspiring singer. Married Julius Rosenberg 1939. Arrested August 11, 1950 — largely as leverage to compel Julius's confession. Convicted on the testimony of her brother David Greenglass and his wife Ruth that she typed espionage notes. Greenglass admitted in 2001 that he perjured himself about Ethel. Executed at Sing Sing June 19, 1953; case widely viewed as a grave miscarriage of justice. Ethel Greenglass Rosenberg was an American Communist Party member, wife of Julius Rosenberg, and the only American woman executed for a crime other than murder in the twentieth century. She was put to death at Sing Sing Prison on June 19, 1953, alongside her husband, after their conviction for conspiracy to commit espionage on behalf of the Soviet Union.
The federal prosecution against Ethel rested almost entirely on the testimony of her brother David Greenglass, who claimed she had typed up notes containing atomic bomb information that her husband then passed to Soviet intelligence. In 2001, Greenglass admitted publicly to journalist Sam Roberts that he had fabricated this testimony in order to protect his own wife, Ruth, who had received immunity from prosecution in exchange for his cooperation. Grand jury transcripts unsealed in 2008 confirmed that Greenglass had originally told prosecutors his sister had nothing to do with the alleged espionage — and that the FBI and the U.S. Attorneys office had pressured him to change his story to secure her conviction.
The death sentence imposed by Judge Irving Kaufman over the recommendation of the prosecution and the FBI drew worldwide condemnation. Her execution required five separate jolts of electricity. She left two young sons, Michael and Robert Meeropol, who have campaigned for her posthumous exoneration; in 2015 they formally petitioned President Obama for an exoneration, which was not granted.
