The Rosenberg Diversion

A shabby old woman, her hair tucked beneath a scarf in the strict Orthodox manner, circulated sadly among the studious rabbis who live close by the Arab sector of Jerusalem. To each she told the same tear-stained story--two relatives of hers, a man & wife, were shortly to be put to death by the Americans.

Twenty of the rabbis, unworldly men who spend their lives among the fine points of Jewish law, complied with the woman's request, though few could read the English-language document they were asked to sign. Next day Israel's Communist newspaper announced proudly that some of Israel's most distinguished religious leaders had begged President Truman to commute the death sentence of Atom Spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.

"What great trouble we are in now!" sighed Rabbi Levin, venerable editor of the Talmudic Encyclopedia. "For us, two Jews remain two Jews no matter what they do. And it is a Jewish duty to try and save life. Could we know it was the Communists who guided our pens? We are not politicians. We are men of God."

In the fate of the American couple who sit in the death house at Sing Sing, scheduled to be electrocuted the week of Jan. 12, Communists the world over last week had an issue they rode hard. Never before has a U.S. civilian court in peacetime imposed a death sentence for espionage, but then, never before has the peacetime U.S. had its security so jeopardized by one ring of spies (the Rosenbergs, Harry Gold, Klaus Fuchs), whose work probably shortened by years the Russians' efforts to build their own Abomb.

Probably few who cheered the public rallies or signed the protest telegrams had the faintest idea what the Rosenberg case was about. Frame-up, hatemongering, antiSemitism, cried the Communists.

Across the front page of Paris' Communist L'Humanite was spread a message from Red-smocked Painter Pablo Picasso: "The hours count. The minutes count. Do not let this crime against humanity take place." Above it was a macabre drawing of two electric chairs in which, side by side, sat the Rosenbergs, holding hands. Across France they were portrayed as "peace partisans," condemned because they opposed Washington plans to war on Russia. In Italy they were "Gli Innocenti" (The Innocents), whose two young children (5 and 9) would be made orphans, and Rome's Communist L'Unita compared them to Dreyfus, Zola, Sacco and Vanzetti, and John Brown.

"Save-the-Rosenbergs" movements were started in England, France, Belgium, Holland and Switzerland. Strings of placarded pickets paraded outside the U.S. Embassy in London's Grosvenor Square. French Poet Paul Eluard's last thoughts before his death last week, according to a cable his daughter sent to Paul Robeson, were for the Rosenbergs. L'Humanite also ran an article by the Communist-line U.S. Author Howard Fast: "Ethel and Julius Rosenberg are good, honest, courageous people. They are innocent . . ."

One incidental benefit to the Communists of the hue & cry over the Rosenbergs: it diverts attention from their own attacks on the Jews in Czechoslovakia, which the New York Daily Worker had yet to tell its readers about.

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