As Jews worldwide honored on Monday the memory of those who were murdered in the Holocaust, a 76-year-old survivor sacrificed his life to save his students in Monday's shooting at Virginia Tech College that left 33 dead and over two dozen wounded.
Professor Liviu Librescu, 76, threw himself in front of the shooter when the man attempted to enter his classroom. The Israeli mechanics and engineering lecturer was shot to death, "but all the students lived - because of him," Virginia Tech student Asael Arad - also an Israeli - told Army Radio.
Several of Librescu's other students sent e-mails to his wife, Marlena, telling of how he blocked the gunman's way and saved their lives, said Librescu's son, Joe.
Virginia Tech shooting
"My father blocked the doorway with his body and asked the students to flee," Joe Librescu said in a telephone interview from his home outside of Tel Aviv. "Students started opening windows and jumping out."
Librescu was respected in his field, his son said.
"His work was his life in a sense," said Joe. "That was a good place for him to practice his research."
Librescu was sent to a labor camp in Russia as a child and saved by the townspeople. His father was deported by the Nazis.
As a scientist working under Nicolae Ceaucescu's oppressive regime, Librescu was forbidden to have any contact with sources outside Romania. He defied the ban, continuing to publish scientific articles secretly.
His Zionist affinities eventually caused him to be forced out of his job. In 1978, the Librescus emigrated from Romania to Israel, where they raised two sons. In 1986, the family moved to Virginia for Librescu's sabbatical. While they only planned to stay in the United States a year, but have lived there ever since.
Librescu's second son, Arie, told The Jerusalem Post that his father had served as an "ambassador" for Israel in a community with many Muslim residents, but few Israelis.
The Foreign Ministry has taken charge of flying Librescu's body back to Israel. The funeral is expected to take place in Ra'anana on Thursday, although that date has not been confirmed.
Meanwhile, police on Tuesday afternoon identified the gunman as Cho Seung-Hui, 23, a South Korean citizen who was studying legally in the United States as an English major at Virginia Tech.
Earlier, Virginia Tech President Charles Steger said that the gunman in the second of two campus attacks was a student at the university, also defending the school's delay in warning students about what became the deadliest shooting rampage in US history.
While Steger did not explicitly say the student, who he identified as an Asian male, was also the gunman in the first shooting, he said he did not believe there was another shooter. The gunman struck down two people at a dormitory Monday before killing 30 more people at a campus building and finally killing himself with a shot to his head.
"We do know that he was an Asian male - this is the second incident - an Asian man who was a resident in one of our dormitories," said Steger in an interview with CNN, confirming for the first time that the killer was a student.
Some students said their first warning came more than two hours after the first shooting, in an e-mail at 9:26 a.m. By then the second shooting had begun.
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