June 20, 2003 By CLYDE HABERMAN FARMINGDALE, N.Y. THE young landscaper stood yesterday over the graves of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, and decided that the shrubbery needed a trim. He would definitely get to it, he said. People might visit, and he wanted everything to look right. He understood that the Rosenbergs were somehow important, the man said in his Spanish-accented English. What exactly they had done in life to make them famous, he had no idea. He knew them only in death. Even then, they were not much more than a name on a broad headstone: Rosenberg. One more name out of thousands, representing all those souls on their journey through forever at Wellwood Cemetery, along the border between Nassau and Suffolk Counties. The Rosenbergs' first names were engraved on separate stone markers at the foot of the graves. There was some other writing, too, but the landscaper could not read it. It was the Hebrew rendering of the couple's names. His was Yonah, hers Etel. >From the dates of their births and deaths, the man could tell that she had been the elder, 37 to his 35. Very young, he said. That is so, he was told. Look, he said, they both died on the same day: June 19, 1953. Was there, he asked, an accident? Not quite, he was told. Across the language barrier, it was not so easy to explain why it was a gross oversimplification to say that the Rosenbergs died. They were executed. Fifty years ago yesterday, having been found guilty of conspiring to pass American atomic secrets to the Soviet Union, they went to the electric chair at Sing Sing - first Julius, then Ethel. They died as the sun was setting. Usually at Sing Sing, the death penalty was carried out at 11 p.m. But that June 19 was a Friday, and 11 p.m. would have pushed the executions well into the Jewish Sabbath, which begins at sundown. The federal judge in Manhattan who sentenced them to death, Irving R. Kaufman, said that the very idea of a Sabbath execution gave him "considerable concern." The Justice Department agreed. So the time was pushed forward. Killing the couple was one thing. But to do the deed on the Sabbath, apparently, was quite another. Back then, the emotions unleashed by the Rosenbergs' trial and execution reached almost to Wellwood's gates. According to some news accounts, protesters stood on the road leading to the cemetery, crying, "Bury them in Russia" as the hearses passed. No such passion was to be found yesterday. Through the morning, the only graveside visitor was a relentless rain. Somebody had been there recently, though. That was evident from five small stones lying on the Rosenberg headstone. Placing such stones is a Jewish custom when visiting a grave. "I bet they were my daughter Ivy's," Michael Meeropol said later. "She went." Mr. Meeropol, 60, does not often go to Wellwood himself. Neither does his brother, Robert Meeropol, 56. They are the Rosenbergs' sons. Long ago, they took the family name of their adoptive parents. The Meeropol brothers needed no cemetery visit to remind themselves what befell their family when they were boys. While the Rosenberg case does not roil the country as it once did, it has hardly gone away. How could it? It said so much about the United States of the early 1950's, its emotions and its fears. And, the Meeropols add, its hysteria. THE available evidence now suggests to historians that Julius Rosenberg did in fact spy for the Soviet Union. The evidence against Ethel Rosenberg, however, is considered flimsy at best. But whatever they may have done, it is far from evident that they had handed Moscow the key to its first atomic bomb, as charged at the time. The couple remain a special case. The United States has had many spies over the last 50 years, including some believed to have done great harm to American interests. Not one was put to death. A remembrance of the Rosenbergs was held last night at City Center, on West 55th Street in Manhattan. Any money made went to the Rosenberg Fund for Children, a foundation headed by Robert Meeropol. In ways that are often small - piano lessons, for example - it helps children who endure trouble because of their parents' political activities. Children, in short, who have something in common with the boys once named Rosenberg. "We don't want to dwell on our childhood," Robert Meeropol said in a brief interview. "But the fact is that we had our childhood experiences. I hope to get beyond them. But I'll never get over them." Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company