Survived the Holocaust to be Killed Saving Lives in a Deranged Reaction to Conspicuous Wealth

A 76-year-old Holocaust survivor who was killed Monday during the massacre at Virginia Tech was eulogized yesterday in the Boro Park section of Brooklyn as a man who made the ultimate sacrifice for his students.

Liviu Librescu, a longtime lecturer at the Blacksburg, Va., university, was shot five times as he tried to prevent a gunman from entering his second-floor classroom — all the while encouraging students to escape through the windows, witnesses have said.

Assemblyman Dov Hikind of Brooklyn gave the sole eulogy at the funeral, which brought several hundred Orthodox Jews to a Boro Park funeral chapel yesterday afternoon. Mr. Hikind, like most of those in attendance, did not know Librescu, a Romanian-born engineer.

Librescu's body was brought to New York after a Brooklyn-based organization, Chesed Shel Emes, offered to arrange a funeral and prepare the body for burial according to Jewish law. The Librescu family has no known connection to Boro Park, although the heavily Orthodox Jewish neighborhood is home to several thousand Holocaust survivors.

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Another Boro Park resident, Sara Tamber, choked back tears outside the funeral chapel. "The way this man finished his life — he's a really big tzadek," she said, using the Hebrew word for a righteous person.

A former student of Librescu's, Dana Dillon-Townes, 28, said she was not surprised by the professor's final selfless act. "That is really the measure of a man," Ms. Dillon-Townes, a Virginia Tech alumna who lives in Manhattan, said.

Librescu survived the Holocaust in a labor camp in Transnistria and a Jewish ghetto in Focsani, Romania. Following World War II, he lived under communist rule in Romania before immigrating to Israel in 1978. He moved his family to Virginia about 20 years ago. In addition to his wife, Librescu is survived by two adult sons.

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