Gold served as a government witness and testified in the case of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were convicted and executed in 1953 for their roles.

He was sent to Switzerland for additional schooling, as opportunities for Jews were limited in Russia, but he was influenced by reading Leo Tolstoy and chose to go into woodworking.

Henrich's mother, Celia, first emigrated from central occupied Ukraine (annexed lands of the Russian Empire) as a teenager to Paris, where she studied dentistry.

After some other jobs, Sam found work as a cabinetmaker at the Victor Talking Machine Company in Camden, New Jersey, across the Delaware River.

To supplement Sam's modest earnings, Celia taught Hebrew and Yiddish to neighborhood children, and was considered an excellent teacher.

[2] In the early 20th century, immigrant groups in Philadelphia clashed over territory; Gold as a boy in the neighborhood suffered with this, especially since he was small and slight, and non-athletic.

[2] After high school graduation, Gold was offered a job by one of his father’s acquaintances at Giftcrafters, a woodworking firm in the northern Kensington section of the city.

Employment there provided economic security and the opportunity to work with college-educated chemists in state-of-the art labs.

Gold had expressed interest in the Socialist Party early in life, influenced by his mother, and the family bought the Jewish Daily Forward.

He later said that he thought Communism was related to "a wild and vaguely defined phenomenon going on in a primitive country thousands of miles away.

During this time, Gold also attended Drexel Institute of Technology, taking night courses in chemistry with the goal of pursuing a career in that field.

Communist governments led East Germany, Poland, Yugoslavia, and other eastern nations dominated by the Soviet Union.

Fuchs confessed that while working in the United States during World War II, he had passed information about the atom bomb to the Soviet Union, which had then been a US ally.

Under interrogation by US law enforcement officials, he admitted that he had been involved in espionage since 1934 and had helped Fuchs pass classified documents from the Manhattan Project to Soviet General Consul Anatoli Yakovlev.

Greenglass's cooperation resulted in the 1950 arrest of his sister Ethel and her husband Julius Rosenberg, who were also charged with conspiracy to commit espionage.

He worked as a clinical chemist in the pathology lab of John F. Kennedy Memorial Hospital, and ultimately for the chief pathologist.