ATOMIC SPIES’ FUNERAL

Press, Volume LXXXIX, Issue 27073, 23 June 1953, Page 9

ATOMIC SPIES’ FUNERAL

BIG CROWDS ATTEND NEW YORK, June 21. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were executed for atomic spying, were given a heroes’ burial by thousands of their sympathisers. About 500 persons jammed the chapel of a funeral parlour for a semi-orthodox Jewish service for the couple. Outside, a crowd estimated by the police to number 10,000, waited in a temperature of 93 degrees. The service was attended by Mrs Sophie Rosenberg, the 71-year-old mother of Julius Rosenberg, who collapsed twice—once as she viewed the body of her son lying in its open coffin. Mr Emanuel Bloch, who led the Rosenbergs’ legal defence, was one of the speakers at the service. “America is living under the heel ©f a military dictator garbed in civilian attire,” he told the sobbing congregation. Mr Bloch described the Rosenbergs as “sweet, tender, intelligent, cultured people,” who had taken a course demanding courage and heroism. After the service ended a funeral procession of more than 300 cars set out for a cemetery 35 miles from New York.

Rosenberg sympathisers claimed that 10,000 people filed past the two coffins when they lay in the chapel last night and this morning. The bodies were brought to the parlour after Rosenberg’s mother had claimed them.

A growing crowd, watched by police, stood vigil outside the chapel last night. Mr A. Nesmeyanov, president of the Soviet Academy of Science, said today that “the murder of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg has provoked the indignation of the entire Soviet people,” according to a Tass message received in London. Mr Nesmeyanov said: “This is a specimen of American legality, American justice and humanity.”