the boys grew up in a loving household and flourished. These positive experiences in the wake of personal and national tragedy inspired Robert to establish the Rosenberg Fund for Children in 1990, his way of paying it forward. www.rfc.org

Abel and Anne provided safe harbor for Robert and his brother, who were only six and ten years old at the time of their parents' execution. Thanks to their adoptive parents, and a large community of generous individuals who rallied to their support,

He later changed the name to “Strange Fruit” and set it to music, and in 1939, played his new song for Billie Holiday at Cafe Society in NYC’s Greenwich Village. She routinely performed it as her last number of the evening, to stunning effect.

Abel was the son of Jewish immigrants and a high school English teacher and poet. In the 1930s, he came across a gruesome photograph of the lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith in Indiana and expressed his revulsion with a poem he titled “Bitter Fruit."

In the aftermath of their death, Robert and his brother were adopted by Anne and her husband Abel Meeropol, who was the author of the famous protest song, "Strange Fruit."

Our founder, Robert Meeropol, is the younger son of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, whose unjust execution by the federal government at the height of the McCarthy era in the 1950s shook the nation.