Brooklyn mourns heroic Va. Tech professor

BY LUIS PEREZ, Newsday Staff Writer | luis.perez@newsday.com

April 18, 2007

Liviu Librescu's coffin came Wednesday afternoon to a place he had never been.

In the heart of Borough Park, Brooklyn, the unadorned wooden coffin was shouldered by Jewish men who had not known the science professor, but whose fathers and grandfathers were, like Librescu, Holocaust survivors.

A community leader called Librescu a "hero of the Jewish people" and a former Virginia Tech student living in Manhattan arrived unannounced and said her former professor's stand against a campus gunman on Monday did not surprise her.

Here, Librescu's wife, far from her Virginia home, spoke to those who had never met him.

"He was a very human person. He was a hard man also. He wanted everybody to be 100 percent," said Marlena Librescu, 72, a small woman in a colorful knit sweater. "His life was only his family and his students."

Mourners inside the nondescript hall of Shomrei Hachomos Orthodox Chapels spoke in awe of Librescu's reported efforts to block a gunman from entering his classroom, allowing an untold number of students to flee.

"We all know in our community that to save one life is to save the world," said City Councilman Dov Hikind, a frequent spokesman for the Orthodox Jewish community in Brooklyn, the largest in the nation. "Look at the final act of Professor Librescu."

Outside the building, the kaddish, the Jewish prayer of mourning, was hummed by hundreds as the coffin was placed into a black car. Some noted that the professor was killed on Holocaust Remembrance Day.

His body arrived in Brooklyn at about 8:30 a.m. Wednesday, a process facilitated by Rabbi Edgar Gluck, a member of the non-profit organization Chesed Shel Emes, which conducts burials for Jews around the world. Gluck said Librescu's body was to be flown out of Kennedy Airport on Wednesday night and would be buried in a cemetery near Ranana, Israel, by sundown Thursday.

As Marlena Librescu spoke, another woman with tears in her eyes walked up behind her. Dana Dillon-Townes, 28, a former Virginia Tech student who now lives in Manhattan, embraced the smaller woman and kissed her face.

Dillon-Townes told reporters she was also a family friend of one of the slain students. "This is just a compilation," she said, "of a huge amount of horror."