PRESTONSBURG, Ky. — While his Justice Department colleagues were chasing federal judgeships and jobs with law firms in New York and Washington, John Rosenberg moved to Appalachia 30 years ago to take up the fight for the poor.

        As a Jew who fled Nazi Germany with his family, Mr. Rosenberg has always said he has witnessed too many injustices in life to ignore the plight of people who couldn't help themselves.

        Appalachian residents needed a champion, and Mr. Rosenberg stepped forward to organize a group of lawyers in an effort to right an assortment of wrongs that people in the mountain region faced.

        “I think it's fair to say he could have done anything he wanted to,” said Steven Bright, director of the Southern Center for Human Rights in Atlanta and one of the nation's top death penalty attorneys.

        “What he did I've always considered remarkable. A lot of people wouldn't have gone to the heart of Appalachia, or wouldn't have stayed.”
       

"Wouldn't change a thing'

        Mr. Rosenberg, now 70, is retiring this month as director of the Appalachian Research and Defense Fund, a federally funded organization that serves 37 eastern Kentucky counties.

        “I wouldn't change a thing,” he said, sitting in a cluttered office in a storefront building in downtown Prestonsburg. “We've made an impact for the better on the lives of people in Appalachia.”

        Known for his tenacity and grit, Mr. Rosenberg has become one of the most respected lawyers in the mountains of Kentucky.

        Mr. Bright, who teaches law at Harvard and Yale, often tells his students about the man who put aside lofty career ambitions and made a difference for the underprivileged in the mountains.

        “He's had a much broader impact than just the region,” Mr. Bright said. “John is known throughout the country. He has been an inspiration and a hero to a whole generation of public interest lawyers.”
       

Saved Red River Gorge

        As director of the Appalachian Research and Defense Fund, Mr. Rosenberg has helped to stop coal operators from strip mining private property without permission.

        That historically had been the norm in Kentucky where companies often owned the coal reserves beneath homesteads and were entitled to rip up the surface to get to the minerals.

        Mr. Rosenberg's legal aid group also took on the state park system to stop discrimination against blacks, and helped halt the federal government from building a dam that would have made the scenic Red River Gorge — a major tourist destination in Kentucky — the unseen floor of a lake.

        Larry York of London, now deputy director of the organization, heard about Mr. Rosenberg while a lawyer in training at the University of Kentucky.

        Mr. York, too, wanted to serve the poor, and he was awestruck by Mr. Rosenberg's John Wayne-like reputation.

        “He reminds me of a bulldog on a bone,” Mr. York said. “As a lawyer, once he gets hold of you, you're not going to be left alone. He's a really fine litigator.”
       

Experienced injustice

        Mr. Rosenberg was 6 years old in 1938 when he, his parents and younger brother were driven from their home next to the synagogue in Magdeburg, Germany. It was Kristallnacht — the “night of broken glass” when Nazis began destroying many of the things the Jews held sacred.

        “We stood in the courtyard and watched as they went into the temple and brought out the Torahs and books and built a bonfire with them,” Mr. Rosenberg said. “I was just a child, holding onto my mother and father.”

        The family fled to Holland and spent a year in a Dutch internment camp before making it to the United States. The family settled in North Carolina, where Mr. Rosenberg saw the injustices that blacks faced in the segregated South.

        In 1962, he went to work in the civil rights division of the Justice Department, hoping to right such wrongs. He was assigned to a team of prosecutors that tackled one of the formative cases in the civil rights movement — the murders of three civil rights workers in Neshoba County, Miss.

        After eight years, Mr. Rosenberg joined the Appalachian Research and Defense Fund. With 28 lawyers now on staff, the organization handles a variety of cases, from helping residents avoid eviction from their homes to issues involving coal mine safety.

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