A final farewell to Liviu Librescu

Sarah Arkin
Danville Register & Bee
Published: April 16, 2008

It was desert-in-summer hot and so bright the rabbi wore sunglasses as he read Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the deceased. It was crowded, as family members, friends, colleagues and elbowing photographers listened to Virginia Tech professor Liviu Librescu’s sons and other relatives recall a heroic man.

More than sadness, there was a sense of respect, and maybe confusion, as hundreds of people gathered in a suburb of Tel Aviv to pay respect to a man who had lost his life saving others.

Click for a special photoessay of the funeral

As people across the United States stopped and watched a calamitous day in Blacksburg unfold on April 16, 2007, Israel came to a standstill in observance of Holocaust Memorial Day. There wasn’t much room in the collective Israeli mentality for more tragedy.

Reading American media outlets throughout the week, black and maroon and orange ribbons dominated headlines, but most people weren’t really talking about it. My American friends and I mentioned it. We traded memories about Columbine. I guess a few people probably brought it up, but it was so far away.

It’s not that the massacre at Virginia Tech wasn’t monumental. But “school shooting,” an inexplicable alliterative tragedy that has worked its way into the American vernacular, is just not culturally translatable.

Watching the story unfold from a sort of removed-insider perspective, I could remotely feel the national upheaval. Students scared to go to class, scared of their classmates. Parents outraged out of fear. Everybody unwilling to accept the idea that 32 intelligent and loved individuals could just senselessly be killed.

There is a disconnect.

Israel is in a region congested with senseless deaths.

You would be hard-pressed to find an Israeli - or a Palestinian for that matter - who has not been personally affected by one.

Israel is a country where the majority of the population knows how to operate a semi-automatic weapon and you can hardly get on the bus without bumping into an M-16.

Eight students at the Mercaz Harav yeshiva in Jerusalem were killed last month. With numerical differences, the headlines could have been almost identical.

But that was a terrorist attack. Anger felt afterward can be channeled into nationalism.

Blame for Virginia Tech can be thrown in multiple directions, but at the end of the day, as headlines scream this week, there isn’t any explanation.

Although I had been in Israel for almost five months at the time of the professor’s funeral on April 20, my Hebrew was limited to market haggling and small talk.  Mostly, I had to read emotions.

Marilena Librescu, the slain professor’s wife of 42 years, heaved the kind of sobs that rock your whole body and shifted her sadness between family members’ shoulders.

Her love was palpable.

Tangible also was the tinge of irony; here was a 76-year-old man who overcame incredulous odds-surviving the Holocaust, fleeing a Communist regime intent on keeping its brightest minds, teaching in the land of the free, killed in a bitter incident while protecting others.

There is a sense of futility when people who escape some of history’s worst maladies die in car accidents.

But I didn’t get a sense of futility in Ra’anana that day.

Headlines quoting Librescu’s son, Joe, ran across the Internet the next day that I think sum up what everyone felt. “My dad died a hero.”

Contact Sarah Arkin at or (434) 791-7983.