IsRealli - the State of Israel official blog » Prof. Liviu Librescu Flown to Israel for Burial

Prof. Liviu Librescu Flown to Israel for Burial

April 19, 2007 at 8:22 am | In Face to Face |

Yesterday, our boss Consul General Arye Mekel and other Consulate staff, met professor Librescu’s widow in Brooklyn for a ceremonial funeral and to help prepare the Professor’s remains to be flown to Israel, where he will be buried. The burial is scheduled for 1pm Israel time (6am est) tomorrow in Ra’ananah, a beautiful town in the center of Israel. Below is a little more information on Professor Librescu’s personal history. We will post more information as we receive it.

From Jewishinstlouis.org:

Professor killed at Virginia tech to be flown to Israel

Deutsche Presse-Agentur (dpa)
04/18/2007

Tel Aviv (dpa) - The body of the Israeli professor who was killed in the Virginia Polytechnic Institute shooting spree is to be flown to Israel Wednesday, his son said.

Liviu Librescu, who according to witnesses saved some of his students by blocking the door to the gunman with his body, is to be buried at the cemetery of the central Israeli town of Ra’anana.

His wife, Marilena, is accompanying his coffin on the flight that is to depart from New York Wednesday and due to arrive in Tel Aviv Thursday, 37-year-old son Arieh told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa in a telephone interview.

Librescu, 76, was born in Romania and with his wife has lived in the US for more than 20 years, but has Israeli nationality. Both his sons, Arieh and Joe, live in Israel.

Both Librescu and his wife were Holocaust survivors. Ironically, the professor died as Israel was marking Holocaust day Tuesday in honour of the 6 million Jews killed during the Second World War.

Librescu spent the war in the ghetto of Ploiesti, just north of Bucharest, but Arieh said he knew little details of his father’s plight for survival - expect that he had to work as a child and provide for his mother because his father was imprisoned in a labour camp.

“He never spoke of those times. He is a person that really always looked forward. He never talked about yesterday,” said Arieh.

Librescu met his wife years after the war in Romania. In 1978, the two emigrated to Israel, where he taught aeronautics and engineering at Tel Aviv University. The couple moved to the US in the mid-1980s.

Arieh said pupils who survived the Virginia tech massacre told him his father instructed them to open the windows and jump from the second floor into a bush below, when one student who tried to escape through the door ran back inside the classroom because he was being shot at.

“From what we know and from what we have received is that when the shooting started, at first the people were lying on the floor.

“My dad just told them to open the windows and jump. It was on the second floor but there was a bush under the windows. He went to hold the door,” he said.

“We don’t know if (Librescu was shot) through the door or if at the end the person was able to push open the door and just shoot him,” the son said.

Arieh described his father as “dedicated to the scientific world, very honest and righteous. “In August he would have been 77,” he said.

3 Comments »

a jewish martyer dies kidush hashem to save lives.

a muslim martyer dies for allah to take lives

Comment by yochanan — April 20, 2007
DR.LIBRESCU should be declared a National hero(or state hero) for action under fire in an
unarmed “rearguard” effort to gain time for
students to escape unharmed.
I should hope the American “driveby media”
give this brave man the HONOR & RESPECT he
deserves.

Comment by ron sterner — May 1, 2007
Through nearly 30 years of fighting fires I have always been keenly aware that the perilous nature of my chosen profession could someday force me to make the “ultimate sacrifice.” I know this, as do all firefighters. Soldiers share the same burden, even as they work under what are surely, sadly, even less attractive odds of meeting a heroic fate. When you choose an occupation like these you are often regarded as a hero. It’s flattering and well intentioned, but often an overstatement. Many of us choose to take these chances but in our hearts we calculate the odds greatly in our favor.

The truest form of self-sacrificial heroism was demonstrated by a man who’s career choice promised him safety and security. Perhaps the nightmares of his youth instilled upon him an emergency plan that he hoped he would never have to use. It may have been the horrors experienced when he was younger than a college student that carved a niche of bravado so profound in his moral compass that when he heard the first gunshot at Virginia Tech, he knew what he had to do.

A school aged Liviu Librescu survived the Holocaust but died saving his own imperiled students over six decades later. It’s impossible to say how God’s hand plays into such things. But no matter how miraculous his survival during World War II, moments before his brave death Professor Liviu Librescu became a doomed but beautiful Guardian Angel to countless students that are now alive only because true heroism can be found in the most unlikely of places.

Comment by David Fraser — May 4, 2007