Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Breaking News

Aaron Swartz Funeral Held in Chicago

A funeral for Aaron Swartz, the 26-year-old “hacktivist” and internet pioneer who promoted open access to information, was held this morning at Central Avenue Synagogue in the Chicago suburb of Highland Park.

Aaron Swartz

The family will sit shiva at their Highland Park home for the 26-year-old Swartz, who hanged himself in his Brooklyn apartment last week.

Swartz’s suicide followed two years fighting federal charges that he illegally downloaded millions of academic journal articles. While Swartz had previously struggled with depression, his family suggested that his legal troubles contributed to the decision to end his life. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has ordered a review into its actions in the hacking case.

The fringe Westboro Baptist Church announced plans to picket the funeral, declaring “GOD H8S Cyber Criminal THUGS” and using an anti-semitic slur against Swartz. But according to reports on Twitter, the group failed to show at the service.

The hacktivist group Anonymous pledged to defend the funeral against protestors, with some members saying they would form a human chain if necessary.

Before Swartz’s death, Anonymous hacked into the Twitter and Facebook accounts of Westboro Baptist Church members and posted their personal information online.

The extremist Westboro Baptist Church, notorious for its controversial picketing of funerals of U.S. service members, had also threatened to disrupt a vigil for victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary shooting, calling the tragedy divine retaliation for Connecticut’s legalization of gay marriage. The church has also spewed vitriol against Jewish organizations, picketing the offices of the Anti-Defamation League and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Aaron Swartz’s relatives and friends are sharing remembrances on a memorial website and on Twitter.

Police found Swartz’s body in his apartment in the New York City borough of Brooklyn on Friday, according to a spokeswoman for the city’s chief medical examiner, which ruled the death a suicide by hanging.

Swartz is widely credited with being a co-author of the specifications for the Web feed format RSS 1.0, which he worked on at age 14, according to a blog post on Saturday from his friend, science fiction author Cory Doctorow.

RSS, which stands for Rich Site Summary, is a format for delivering to users content from sites that change constantly, such as news pages and blogs. Over the years, he became an online icon for helping to make a virtual mountain of information freely available to the public, including an estimated 19 million pages of federal court documents from the PACER case-law system.

“Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves,” Swartz wrote in an online “manifesto” dated 2008. “The world’s entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries in books and journals, is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of private corporations. … sharing isn’t immoral – it’s a moral imperative. Only those blinded by greed would refuse to let a friend make a copy,” he wrote. That belief – that information should be shared and available for the good of society – prompted Swartz to found the nonprofit group DemandProgress.

The group led a successful campaign to block a bill introduced in 2011 in the U.S. House of Representatives called the Stop Online Piracy Act.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

We’ve set a goal to raise $260,000 by December 31. That’s an ambitious goal, but one that will give us the resources we need to invest in the high quality news, opinion, analysis and cultural coverage that isn’t available anywhere else.

If you feel inspired to make an impact, now is the time to give something back. Join us as a member at your most generous level.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

With your support, we’ll be ready for whatever 2025 brings.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.