Michelle Alman Harrison: Like Mother, Like Grandmother

Above is David and Emily Alman's daughter Michelle. She's a doctor working in an orphanage in India called Shishur Sevay.
from Michelle's blog

Shishur Sevay is a Home for orphan girls, those who have lost connection to family and community and who would otherwise live in an institution. The girls are thriving, learning, and beginning to see different futures for themselves. Our children, abled and disabiled share their lives with each other and with Dr. Michelle Harrison, aka "Mummy." who lives in the home Our mission is to provide a non-institutional model for orphaned children where they are nurtured and educated so they can be participating members of Society.

David Alman: World Full Of Strangers

World Full Of Strangers I believe was David's most critically acclaimed book. World Full Of Strangers

David Alman: Well Of Compassion

David Alman: Hourglass

David Alman was kind enough to send me copies of three of his out of print books. I'm in the process of reading them now. They were all very well reviewed when first published. Hourglass was published in 1947
Hourglass 2

David Alman: Testifying Before HUAC: 1955

alman-huac
The anticipated revenge of HUAC for being involved with the Committee To Save The Rosenbergs
about Francis Walter from wikipedia

Francis Eugene Walter (May 26, 1894 – May 31, 1963) was a Democratic member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Pennsylvania.
Francis Walter was born in Easton, Pennsylvania. He attended Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and George Washington University and Georgetown University in Washington, D.C.
During both World War I and World War II he served in the air service of the United States Navy. He was the director of the Broad Street Trust Company in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and of the Easton National Bank in Easton, Pennsylvania. From 1928 to 1933 he was the Solicitor of Northampton County, Pennsylvania. He was a delegate to the 1928 Democratic National Convention. He was elected as a Democrat to the 73rd United States Congress and served until his death in Washington, D.C.
Walter is best known for the McCarran-Walter Act, passed over President Truman's veto in 1952, which continued the quota system based on the national origin of immigrants introduced in 1924 and allowed the United States government to deport and bar from entry those identified as subversives, particularly members and former members of the Communist Party.
A noted immigration historian has characterized Walter's views as "reactionary and racist." A strong anti-Communist, Walter went on to serve as chairman of the United States House Un-American Activities Committee during the 84th through 88th Congresses. Walter also served as a director of the Pioneer Fund, a foundation best known for its advocacy of IQ variation among races.
Walter appeared in a central role in the 1960s-era U.S. government anti-Communist propaganda film Operation Abolition. Historical footage of Walter also appears in the 1990 documentary film Berkeley in the Sixties..
He is buried in Arlington National Cemetery.

Emily Alman With Sophie Rosenberg: 1953

Photos Of Rosenberg Vigil In Washington D.C.: 1953

Rosenberg Dc Vigil
These are from Life Magazine. Many of them show Julius Rosenberg's mother Sophie with her grandsons Michael and Robert.

10,000 Rally To Save The Rosenbergs: May 4, 1953

Rosenberg Rally
A major part of David and Emily Alman's book Exoneration concerns the efforts of National Committee To Reopen the Rosenberg Case David and Emily were two of the leaders in that effort. The second page n the document above shows a vigil in Washington D.C.

David Alman: Husband Of Mayoral Candidate:1972

Emily Alman Runs For Mayor Of East Brunswick: 1972

The last page of the document is from a separate article about the eventual winner, Jean Walling, who tragically died in the iddle of her term in 1975
Emily Mayor

Cecilia Greenstone Arnow

Image from Children of Ellis Island This was Emily Arnow Alman's remarkable mother.
from erraticimpact

Cecilia Greenstone: Born in Bialystok, in Russian Poland in 1887, Cecilia led an unconventional life from an early age. Her father owned a cigarette factory in their hometown, and Cecilia would frequently be left in charge in her father’s absence. By the age of 12 she had gotten caught up in the Socialist spirit of the times and had succeeded in organizing the cigarette factory’s workers. Though the factory did not last, Cecilia’s career in social work and issues had already begun. Cecilia, fearful of the pogroms, joined the Socialist Zionists and would frequently protest on the streets. Soon the Russian government accused the group of being anti-government and the police began to raid their meetings in battles that became increasingly violent. In 1905 the family fl ed for America. After arriving in New York, and turning down job offers until she could speak English, Cecilia went to the Astor Place Library (which would later become the headquarters for HIAS) determined to learn English. Spending hours on end at the library, she taught herself not just English, but also Hebrew, German and Yiddish, and eventually learned to speak seven languages. This feat brought her to the attention of the head of the Hebrew Division, where she became an assistant to the librarian. She later worked as a translator for the famed Jewish banker and philanthropist Jacob Schiff. It was while in this position that she came to the attention of the New York Section of the National Council of Jewish Women (NCJW,) an organization that worked hand in hand with HIAS. Founded out of concern for the hundreds of thousands of single and unaccompanied young Jewish women who came through the port of Ellis Island, the NCJW feared that these young women might be “mislead into immoral lives, and other girls will be subjected to great dangers because of the lack of some directing and protecting agency at Ellis Island.” At the time, it was not uncommon for young, newly arrived female immigrants to be taken advantage of, and many fell into lives of crime and prostitution. It was the job of the NCJW “to make sure that the ‘uncle’ who was waiting to meet the immigrant girl was truly her uncle and not a procurer.” “To rescue human dignity from this nightmare – that was the single thought my co-workers and I had,” recalled Greenstone in 1962. “To show them that in all the hard sorrow of their lives, they did not stand alone, and they did not have to succumb. To show them that if one person misuses or betrayed them, another would not; that their violated dignity could not be healed on the street, in theft, in drink, in drugs or suicide. To show them dignity could only be restored by that which a human does for oneself.” Beginning work in 1907, Greenstone would eventually work six days a week at Ellis Island, assisting single women, mothers and children through the immigration process. She personally intervened in countless cases where young women, who had been rejected by the health inspectors, were scheduled for deportation. She helped those, who because they could not speak enough English to answer inspector’s questions, were labeled “retarded” and set to be deported. She arranged for kosher food to be delivered to patients at the island’s hospital, and she established Shabbat and holiday services on the Island for Jewish immigrants. In 1910 alone the NCJW dealt with over 60,000 women and children, most of whom were helped by Cecilia. In her spare time she taught English classes and arraigned socials, theater outings and events that would bring newly settled immigrants in touch with American life. She helped to arrange marriages for young women whose suitors were moral and upstanding citizens, and she helped young women find work. Her motto: “ jobs, not charity.” By 1912 she was promoted to head agent for the NCJW on Ellis Island. A 1913 letter to an official at HIAS reads in part that “Miss Greenstone spends every cent of her salary to help the immigrants on the island… [She] renders her service without any regard to time or effort to any girl or woman who needs her service.” In 1914 Cecilia was asked by HIAS to travel to Riga, in Russian Latvia to inspect a new facility that had been built by the Russian government to house Jewish immigrants that were awaiting passage to America. Given the special commission as a “delegate” to Russia, Cecilia traveled to Europe aboard the Kursk. It was an uneventful trip, but a day before they reached Liverpool, England declared war on Germany, and the path of the Kursk was diverted. Cecilia became a witness to the first naval battle of World War I. By the time she returned to America, the number of immigrants arriving at Ellis Island was dwindling. With the war in Europe the number of immigrant arrivals dropped, from 875,000 in 1914 to 28,000 by 1918. After the end of the war, restrictive new laws limited the number of Jewish immigrants, and Greenstone was no longer needed at Ellis Island. Greenstone later married and had two children, but always continued her career in social work, first at Hamilton House, then Henry Street, and later through the depression years and the second World War at the Grand Street Settlement. She later worked as a social worker at the Sons and Daughters of Israel Home. She died in 1971 at age 84. “She was a liberated woman in Russia,” recalled her great grandson Jesse Peterson, “running a cigarette factory, marching into a hail of bullets with the young Socialist Zionists and emerging as the matriarch of the entire Greenstone family. This was not a woman who would accept second-class status in any culture or country, and throughout her career, she fought it, both for herself and her fellow women. In America, she took up the same struggle against injustice that she had fought on the streets of her native Russia, but here, rather than protest; she would fight injustice as a social worker, caring for one victim at a time.”

David and Emily Alman (of 10 Monroe Street)

No matter what your feelings might be about the Rosenberg case you can't help but tip your hat to the courage and conviction of the Almans.
from the Saratogian of 9/22/2002

Attorney revisits traitor case of Rosenbergs/Sobell at Skidmore
In 1953, Americans Ethel and Julius Rosenberg and Morton Sobell were convicted of conspiring to steal classified information about the atomic bomb on behalf of the Soviet Union. The Rosenbergs were sentenced to death, and Sobell was sentenced to 30 years in prison. Sunday, September 22, 2002, By MAE G. BANNER
From the outset of the case, many believed that a gross miscarriage of justice was being done. One of those who questioned the trial and sentence was Dr. Emily Arnow Alman, a professor emerita and former chairwoman of the Sociology Department at Douglass College, Rutgers University. Dr. Alman also is an attorney who has received many honors for her service to clients and to the field of matrimonial law.

Now a resident of Ballston Spa, Dr. Alman will give a talk, ''The Case against Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and Morton Sobell: Was Justice Done?'' at 7:30 p.m. Monday, Sept. 23, in Wilson Chapel on the Skidmore College campus. The talk is free and open to the public.

Dr. Alman will describe the social and political context of the time, 1950-53, in which the Rosenberg-Sobell case arose. Also, she will present evidence to support her conclusion, arrived at through decades of study, that the defendants were wrongly convicted.

In 1951, Dr. Alman became interested and involved in the Rosenberg-Sobell case. After reading the trial transcript, she was convinced that a gross miscarriage of justice had occurred. She helped to form the National Committee to Secure Justice in the case. The committee's goals were to obtain a new trial for the defendants and/or clemency for the Rosenbergs.

New evidence surfaced, including a written confession by David Greenglass, the prosecution's chief witness, that he had agreed to testify to matters he knew nothing about first-hand, but that had been described to him by the FBI.

The committee published 10,000 copies of the verbatim trial transcript and sent copies to editors, government officials, scientists, members of Congress and prominent persons. Similar committees arose in major cities around the country, and their efforts culminated in a vigil at the White House. There was also an outpouring of support from around the world. The New York Times estimated that at least 3 million Americans eventually petitioned the White House for clemency for the Rosenbergs.

In 1956, three years after the execution of the couple, Dr. Alman and her husband David were called to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee, where they defended the right of Americans to criticize prosecutorial and judicial actions that led to miscarriages of justice.

While on sabbatical leave from Rutgers in 1978, Dr. Alman used the Freedom of Information Act and other sources to obtain many definitive documents bearing on the case, including a pre-trial assurance by Federal Judge Irving Kaufman to the Department of Justice that he intended to sentence Julius Rosenberg to death. Other documents came from the Atomic Energy Commission, the State Department and the Department of Justice.

Dr. Alman and her husband are now completing a book on the case that will carry the first full account of the activities of the Committee to Secure Justice and of the campaign for a new trial and clemency that they spearheaded. The book will examine the case in light of David Greenglass's televised confession in December, 2001, that he had committed perjury at the Rosenberg-Sobell trial at the instruction of the prosecution.

The Skidmore lecture is co-sponsored by the Saratoga Springs chapter of Hadassah, which is the largest Jewish women's Zionist organization in the U.S.

from Emily's 2004 obituary

Emily Arnow Alman BALLSTON SPA -- Emily Arnow Alman of Ballston Spa died on March 18, 2004, at the age of 82. Dr. Alman was a sociologist and attorney.At her retirement from law, she was honored with a plaque by the Middlesex County Bar Association of New Jersey that read in part, 'The fact that you often faced overwhelming odds could not quench your indomitable spirit.' Dr. Alman was committed to advancing the causes of battered women, the poor and the rights of children in broken homes to have access to both their parents and grandparents. Dr. Alman received her B.A. at Hunter College in 1945 and her M.A. and Ph.D. at the New School For Social Research in 1963.She received her law degree at Rutgers University Law School in 1977.She taught sociology at Rutgers University's Douglas College from 1960 to 1986 and served as chairperson of the Department of Sociology for eight years.Her chief interests in sociology and law were family law, bias law and public policy law and interactions between social agencies and institutions and various population groups.
Dr. Alman's creative works include 'Ride the Long Night,' a novel (McMillan, 1963), and 'The Ninety-First Day,' a semi-documentary film on mental illness and shortcomings in institutional treatment (1963). 'We Were There,' a book in progress at the time of her death and co-authored with her husband, is based on government documents.
Dr. Alman was persuaded by the trial record to become one of the founders of a committee in 1951, the National Committee to Secure Justice in the Rosenberg-Sobell Case, to secure a new trial or clemency for the Rosenbergs and reduction of Morton Sobell's 30-year sentence. Dr. Alman was also a chairperson of the Concerned Citizens of East Brunswick, N.J., from 1970-78, which was instrumental in causing the New Jersey Turnpike to erect noise abatement berms along portions of the turnpike.She was also a member of the American and New Jersey bar associations and a number of professional associations and organizations for the protection of battered women.
Dr. Alman won first prize at the American Film Festival in 1964 for 'The Ninety-First Day' and the Appleton Award for dedicated service to the legal community.A short biography of her appears in Who's Who in American Women. Prior to becoming a sociologist and lawyer, Dr. Alman was a New York City probation officer.From 1957 to 1970, she and her husband and children were farmers in Englishtown, N.J. In 1972, Dr. Alman was an Independent candidate for mayor of East Brunswick, N.J. She is survived by her husband, David, whom she met at the age of 13 and married in 1940 at the age of 18 and with whom she celebrated every day of her life.

David Alman

With the help of Leonard Lehrman of National Committee To Reopen the Rosenberg Case
and Michael Meeropol I was able to get in touch with David Alman. What a great discovery, both personal and historical

David,
I lived in KV from about 1941 to 1957 with my wife, Emily, and two daughters, Michelle, now a physician living in India, and Jennifer, now a lawyer, formerly practicing in NJ, NY and about to take bar exam in Florida. My wife became a sociology professor at Douglas College at Rutgers University, and then became a lawyer in NJ. Emily and I met at Seward Park High School, on Essex Street, in  1936.
I was a NY State Parole Officer for about a year when we lived at KV . Became a writer and Emily and I got interested in the Rosenberg-Sobell case in 1951 and were involved in the clemency campaign on behalf of the Rosenbergs. In 1995 we began writing a book on the case, but Emily died in 2004 before we had finished it. I completed the book and, since I'm now 90, decided to forego the 2-3 years of making the rounds of publishers, and arranged with a small press, Green Elms, to publish it. It's called Exoneration, and we printed a draft of the book about 3 months ago to circulate among historians and lawyers for their reactions. Official publication will be at the beginning of 2010.
Checked out the KV website. Terrific, but wonder where you find the time to keep it up.
Feel free to be in touch if you have any questions.

Heir To An Execution

After giving the tour to Zeva and her friends I went back to do some more research on the Rosenbergs and also re-watched Heir To An Execution to refresh my knowledge about the case. The clip above caught my attention because of this recent article in the villager, an excerpt

Rosenberg backers say, ‘Case is still full of holes’, By Mary Reinholz
For nearly six decades now, friends and sympathizers of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg have marched, picketed and petitioned the U.S. government, claiming that the Lower East Side couple were framed by prosecutors as atomic spies for Russia before they were unjustly executed in Sing Sing’s electric chair on June 19, 1953.
The sensational case seared the American psyche during the Cold War and still elicits passionate debate even as many Rosenberg supporters came to believe that Julius and possibly Ethel had been at least minor players in an espionage ring starting when the U.S. was an ally of the Soviet Union during the Nazi onslaught of World War II.
Then came a stunning acknowledgement last September: For the first time, Morton Sobell, a co-defendant of the Rosenbergs who had maintained his innocence before and after more than 18 years in federal prisons, including Alcatraz, admitted to Sam Roberts of The New York Times that he had been a spy with Julius Rosenberg, passing on military and industrial secrets to the Soviets.
Sobell, now 92, also told Roberts that he didn’t believe Ethel Rosenberg was guilty of anything beyond being Julius’s wife, a claim disputed by historians like Ronald Radosh, author of “The Rosenberg File,” who nonetheless believe that secret grand jury testimony released last September by the National Archives cast doubt on a key government charge that led to her conviction for a capital crime.
And while Radosh claimed that Sobell’s disclosures shattered a fundamental assumption of the American left, there were no mea culpas coming from organizers of a recent annual memorial marking the 56th anniversary of the Rosenbergs’ execution at New York University’s Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives on Washington Square South.
The free event, held on the Rosenbergs’ 70th wedding anniversary, drew about 75 people — some in their 80s and 90s. They heard speeches, musical tributes, messages of support from the Rosenbergs’ orphaned adult children, Michael and Robert Meeropol, and from a granddaughter, Rachel Meeropol, now an attorney with the Center for Constitutional Rights.
There was also a reading of a petition to be sent to U.S. Attorney General Eric H. Holder, Jr., asking once again that the government re-examine the Rosenberg-Sobell case.
“The case is still full of holes,” said Richard Corey, 62, a Chelsea painter and songwriter who is co-director of the National Committee To Reopen the Rosenberg Case, which sponsored the memorial. Corey attended the event with his 95-year-old father, “Professor” Irwin Corey, the celebrated stand-up comic and activist who was blacklisted during the McCarthy era.
“Everybody now recognizes that Ethel Rosenberg was arrested and lies were told so the government could use her as a lever to get a confession from Julius, who was not involved in atomic spying. He helped an ally during World War II,” contended the younger Corey. He noted in a telephone conversation that he grew up on Long Island “with an F.B.I. car parked in front of our house. All I can say is that I was extremely disappointed that my family didn’t storm Sing Sing prison and get Ethel out,” he said.
Long Island conductor/composer Leonard Lehrman, who co-directs the N.C.R.R.C. with Corey, noted that the secret grand jury testimony in the case suggests that key trial statements from co-defendant David Greenglass, Ethel’s brother, and his wife, Ruth Greenglass, both of whom became government witnesses and pariahs on the American left, were fabricated by them and “coached by the F.B.I.”
Their claim at trial that Ethel typed up notes from David Greenglass when he was an Army machinist at a top-secret, atom bomb-making facility in Los Alamos, N.M., called the Manhattan Project and moonlighting as a Soviet mole, is believed by many to have helped seal Ethel Rosenberg’s doom. A jury convicted the couple in a Foley Square federal courthouse on March 29, 1951, for conspiracy to commit espionage. Their lawyer, Emanuel Bloch, protested the Rosenbergs’ innocence up until the night before their deaths after worldwide pleas for clemency were ignored. French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre called their execution a “legal lynching.”
None of the people interviewed for this article knew the Rosenbergs personally. But one of the speakers at the memorial, Miriam Moskowitz, 93, who was convicted in 1950 for conspiracy to obstruct justice in another Cold War case that prosecutors at the time billed as a “dress rehearsal” for the Rosenberg trial, told this reporter that she met Ethel Rosenberg in jail — the notorious Women’s House of Detention on Greenwich Ave.
“On July 29, 1950, I was arrested and two weeks later Ethel Rosenberg was arrested,” Moskowitz wrote in an e-mail. “She was lodged on the 9th floor and I on the 5th so we still did not meet. After her conviction she was brought down to my floor (5th) because there was a special cell there where the guard could keep her in sight all the time — they were afraid, I think, that she would do something drastic to herself. (What a joke: Ethel said they never understood that would be the last thing in the world she could ever do.) So on the 5th floor we finally met and shared ‘leisure’ time until she was shipped to Sing Sing prison.”
Moskowitz, who is including the episode in a chapter of a book she’s completing about her case and that of co-defendant Abraham Brofman, said she decided to come to the memorial because “for 56 years I have been haunted by the Rosenberg case — it was a terrible time, sheer madness and more frightening than my worst childhood bad dreams.”
She also seemed concerned about New York Timesman Sam Roberts’s article on Morton Sobell’s admissions, claiming Roberts misquoted him and “slanted” his account of Sobell’s spy activities.
Not surprisingly, N.C.R.R.C.’s Lehrman, 59, shares that view.
“Sam twisted [Sobell’s] words to make it seem as though he was admitting to more than he was,” Lehrman said. “And Morty’s letter that appeared in The New York Times [clarified] that he, in fact, knew absolutely nothing about any atomic espionage.”
Lehrman, who was 3 years old when the Rosenbergs were executed, believes that Julius Rosenberg, regarded by many on the left as an ardent Communist, was motivated by idealistic notions about the Soviet Union — viewed by some party members as a socialist utopia free of anti-Semitism.
“Some of those who tried to help the Soviet Union as a wartime ally may have broken some laws in order to do that,” Lehrman said in an e-mail. “The Cold War put their actions into a different context, just the way 9/11 put Lynne Stewart’s sometimes rule-breaking defense of her client into a different light,” he added, alluding to the Downtown lawyer convicted of materially aiding terrorism in her defense of an imprisoned Egyptian Muslim cleric. “She did not deserve a harsh sentence, and neither did Julius Rosenberg,” Lehrman said.
The National Committee to Reopen the Rosenberg Case was directed for 42 years by Aaron Katz, who died in Florida last year at 92. Katz was also active in a predecessor group that began in 1951 called The Committee To Secure Justice in the Rosenberg Case, said one of the founders of that group, David Alman, 90. Alman also spoke at the Rosenberg memorial and read from a draft of a book he wrote with his late wife, lawyer and sociologist Emily Arnow Alman, called “Case for Exoneration: The Rosenberg-Sobell Trial in the 21st Century.”
The Almans did not know the Rosebergs socially when both couples were living at the Knickerbocker Village housing complex on the Lower East Side. But Alman said his wife had a brief conversation with Ethel Rosenberg at a small park nearby and never forgot it.
“My wife was walking with a neighbor who introduced her to Ethel Rosenberg in a little park and the women both had little babies with them,” he recalled. “They only spoke three or four minutes, but Emily said she couldn’t get it out of her mind that this woman she had spoken to in the park had been sentenced to death. It was a human connection and it led to the formation of a committee to obtain clemency in the fall of 1951. We were both deeply involved in the campaign for clemency and for a new trial.”
Alman has come to believe that Julius Rosenberg, Morton Sobell and David Greenglass, the government’s chief witness who testified against his sister, Ethel Rosenberg, were guilty of crimes “no matter how you parse it,” but were convicted on the wrong charges.
“I don’t feel what they did is any small thing,” Alman said. “I can’t speak for everyone, but I would have no problem if they had been tried for the crime they committed — and not treason. Greenglass and his wife weren’t able to stand up to the threats [of prosecutors] and they capitulated,” he added. “But they didn’t tell the whole truth.”