Born to Jewish immigrants and brought up in New York, they were both raised in the orthodox Jewish faith. Julius had originally planned to train as a Rabbi and indeed had started his training when all of a sudden, while studying for a degree in Electrical Engineering at the City College in New York, he lost his faith and found instead Marxism, here he became a card carrying communist and hard line Stalinist.
Ethel Greenglass graduated from college just at the time of the Great Depression, her goal was to create a life for herself within the arts, mainly through Music, Drama or Dancing, but despite all her efforts she failed to achieve any success in this field, but her talent became more apparent as she became involved in left wing activism and fund raising. It was at a fund raising event where she met Julius, they were married in 1939.
Julius search for work led to a civilian position at the US Signal Corp, and it was here where the urge to spy for the Soviet Union became stronger. In 1943 Julius took a back seat in communist party activism in order that he could remain out of view of the FBI who were constantly on the look out for traitors, Julius knew that should he be seen at an event, his espionage career would be over. He was now able to concentrate on spying under the direction of Anatoli Yakovlev from the Russian Consulate in New York, and whose sole occupation was to gain as much information on the US atomic weapons development programme.
By a strange coincidence or maybe not the brother in law of Julius, David Greenglass, happened to have been working at the Los Alamos complex in New Mexico, on the “Manhattan Project” and at the request of his brother in law began to obtain top secret documents concerning the complex building of the atom bomb.
Yakovlev sent at the request of Julius, a courier named Harry Gold to retrieve the documents from Greenglass in New Mexico. Unknown to Greenglass and Rosenberg, Gold also obtained at the same time documents from the British scientist, Klaus Fuchs who was also working on the “Manhattan Project”. Greenglass even visited his sister and brother in law in New York on occasions where they discussed the sensitive nature of the work being done in New Mexico; this went on throughout the war, Greenglass passing documents over to Rosenberg, who in turn passed them over to Yakovlev.
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