Ethel and Julius Rosenberg are shown in 1951, during their trial for espionage in New York City.

AP FILE PHOTO

PROVIDENCE — “Julius Rosenberg was involved in something illegal — no one is claiming he was totally innocent — but he was not stealing atomic secrets.”

That was the view of Robert Meeropol in an interview Tuesday. His parents, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, were executed in 1953 after being found guilty of espionage for passing information to the Soviet Union about the landmark U.S. effort to create nuclear weapons in World War II.

Now, there is a new documentary film that Meeropol said will shed some light on the case.

“The Brother Who Sent the Rosenbergs to the Electric Chair” will be shown Sunday at 1:30 p.m. at the Jewish Community Center of Rhode Island, 401 Elmgrove Ave. The event is free to the public. Meeropol said he will offer “a soft pitch” for donations equal to the cost of a movie ticket to benefit the nonprofit, Massachusetts-based Rosenberg Fund for Children. Donations are tax deductible.

Meeropol will also autograph copies of his latest book, “An Execution in the Family: One Son’s Journey,” and will answer questions.

French director Clara Kuperberg made the film for French public television, where it premiered this fall. The “Brother” of the movie title is David Greenglass, who testified against his sister Ethel Rosenberg and his brother-in-law Julius Rosenberg.

Meeropol described the film: “It explores the case primarily by interviewing three people — New York Times reporter Sam Roberts, who wrote a book called ‘The Brother’ about David Greenglass, describing his role in providing the key evidence that led to my parents’ execution. Then, it interviews an FBI agent. Then it interviews me. There’s all sorts of background information. It brings out secret government files. There is a contrast between the negative of Greenglass betraying his family in order to save his own skin, and my work to make the Rosenberg foundation a success.”

Robert Meeropol and his brother, Michael, fought for decades to clear their parents’ names, only to be buffeted by recurring disclosures of secret files that many regard as proof of the Rosenbergs’ guilt.

These disclosures include revelations of the National Security Agency’s Venona Project and the Mitrokhin Archive. Venona was the code name for a top-secret effort to decipher Soviet cables transmitted from this country to Moscow during World War II. Due to wartime shortages, Soviet radio operators violated their own security regulations when they reused pads of random numbers to encipher messages, giving U.S. code breakers a lever to pry some of the text into the open.

In the cables, made public by the government in 1995, Julius Rosenberg is referred to by such code names as Liberal and Antenna.

“The Mitrokhin Archive” is the title of a book by British historian Christopher Andrew, who studied a mass of materials plundered from the files of the KGB, the now-defunct Soviet secret spy agency, and smuggled to Britain by Maj. Vasili Mitrokhin. A further blow to the Rosenbergs’ case came in 2008 when Morton Sobel, who was convicted with the Rosenbergs and served nearly two decades in prison, confessed at the age of 91 for the first time that he had been a spy for the USSR and implicated Julius Rosenberg.

Of Ethel Rosenberg, Sobel told The New York Times, “She knew what she was doing, but what was she guilty of? Of being Julius’ wife.”

Ronald Radosh, an emeritus professor of history at the City University of New York, said in a Los Angeles Times op-ed piece immediately afterward that Sobel’s revelations ended all controversy about the Rosenberg case. He wrote that “… conspiracy theories should come to an end. The Rosenbergs were actual and dangerous Soviet spies.”

But Meeropol said he believes the information collected by his father was “military-industrial” grade stuff, not atomic secrets.

“It’s generally known that our entire industry was militarized during World War II,” he said. “You didn’t have to be James Bond sneaking around secret installations in order to be engaged in espionage. You could take a camera into a GM plant and take pictures, and that’s espionage. But it wasn’t the atomic bomb, which is what is reported in Venona.”

Meeropol said that as recently as 2008 he was uncertain of Julius Rosenberg’s guilt, but Sobel’s revelation persuaded him “once and for all” of his father’s role as a spy. But he said he still considers him guilty only of non-atomic espionage.

He said, however, that the federal government pressed the case against his parents that they had been involved in ferrying secrets from the super-secret Los Alamos research site in New Mexico, where the Manhattan Project produced the nuclear bomb.

“It was all about the atomic bomb and the death penalty,” he said. “Ethel wasn’t actively involved in any illegal activity, and they killed her anyway. The reason we are talking today is because it was the atomic bomb, and two young people with small children were killed. There were suspicions back then that there was an element of anti-Semitism, that if these had not been Jewish defendants, it would have been much less likely that there would have been a death penalty. That is what some people think.”

tmorgan@projo.com