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https://april16archive.org/files/original/Candlelightvigil_with Jewish Community _fe07e2e4a9.JPG
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2007-07-09
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2007-07-09 13:29:34
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Patrick Donohoe
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Patrick Donohoe
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2007-07-09
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My wife (Nina), Katie (son's fiancee), her friend Rachel and I attended the Candlelight Vigil @ the drillfield after the events of 4/16. We happened to meet w/ some of the Jewish Community (Sue Kurtz, her husband, Alicia Cohen and others) @ Virginia Tech.
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eng
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Candlelight Vigil w/ Jewish Community
april 17
candlelight vigil
Drillfield
jewish
-
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Brent Jesiek
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Joshua Runyan
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2007-07-02
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Joshua Runyan
<i>Chabad.edu</i>
As a university and nation began the transition from shock to mourning one day after the deadliest shooting attack in American history, the network of more than 100 campus Chabad Houses declared a "Week of Goodness and Kindness" as a way to honor the memory of the slain. The goal of the effort, according to organizers, is simple: to translate the pain of grief into the healing of positive action.
Beginning this Friday, Chabad on Campus representatives will be handing out "Hearts to Hokies" pledge cards at the campuses they serve. Students will be encouraged to pledge a good deed in the merit of those lost; the collected cards will be presented later to the students of Virginia Tech. Students and others can also complete an online "pledge card" at <a href="http://www.hearts2hokies.com/">www.Hearts2Hokies.com</a>.
"This tragedy hits uniquely close to home for college students across America," stated Rabbi Yossy Gordon, executive director for the New York-based Chabad on Campus International Foundation. "Our campaign provides a tangible way to react in a substantive manner. It reminds that grief can be channeled into positive action, and highlights the concept that many small acts add up in a meaningful way."
According to Gordon, "we look to our traditions for solace and direction. We recognize the essential human need to do something, to make something good result from tragedy, to attempt to somehow bring balance into the world by increasing in 'senseless' acts of goodness and kindness."
In the immediate aftermath of an apparent rampage by a Virginia Tech student, two Chabad-Lubavitch emissaries from elsewhere in the state - Rabbi Yossel Kranz, executive director of the Richmond, Va.-based Chabad of the Virginias and Rabbi Shlomo Mayer from the Chabad House at the University of Virginia - traveled to the site of the attacks to assist with the needs of the students and faculty.
And as Mayer and Kranz were busy on Tuesday coordinating the care of a victim's body in accordance with Jewish law - Virginia Tech professor of mechanical engineering Liviu Librescu, a 75-year-old Romanian Holocaust survivor who was shot by Cho Seung-Hui while shielding his class from the assailant's bullets - and arranging its transport to Israel for burial, their colleagues as far away as Seattle were planning Chabad's national response.
"Jewish tradition teaches that each person is created in the Divine image," stated Rabbi Moshe C. Dubrowski, director of operations for the New York-based Chabad on Campus International Foundation, in reference to the April 16 carnage at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in Blacksburg, Va., that left 32 victims dead and more than 20 injured. "All those affected by this tragedy are in our thoughts and prayers."
"The Lubavitcher Rebbe, of righteous memory, taught of the need to turn tears into action," explained Dubrowski. "In the light of this horror, Chabad on Campus urges students to increase in acts of goodness and kindness."
"It's terrible and no one should ever have to know such a thing," said Chaya Estrin, who with her husband Rabbi Ellie Estrin, directs the Chabad House at the Seattle campus of the University of Washington. "It's okay to mourn, it's okay to be upset, but after crying, we have to channel our grief into positive actions."
The University of Washington has had its own share of tragedy recently, following the April 2 murder of a 26-year-old researcher by an estranged boyfriend who then turned the gun on himself.
In the wake of this week's news out of Virginia, "many students are in a state of shock, they don't know what to do," said Estrin.
All the more reason, said Chana Mayer, co-director of the University of Virginia's Chabad House, to give students a chance to positively affect the world around them.
"A little light dispels a lot darkness," said Mayer. "It doesn't have to be something complicated or expensive; simple good deeds are powerful things right at our fingertips."
For more information please visit <a href="http://www.hearts2hokies.com/">www.Hearts2Hokies.com</a>.
--
Archived with permission of Chabad on Campus International Foundation.
Original Source: <a href="http://www.chabad.edu/templates/articlecco.asp?AID=512150">http://www.chabad.edu/templates/articlecco.asp?AID=512150</a>
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eng
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Sholom Charytan (SCharytan@Chabad.edu)
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Chabad Responds to Tragedy With Mitzvah Drive: "Hearts to Hokies" Campaign to Begin Friday
chabad house
chabad on campus
hearts to hokies
jewish
mitzvah drive
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Brent Jesiek
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Manny Frishberg
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2007-07-02
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06/08/07
Manny Frishberg • JTNews Correspondent
On the morning of April 16, Dr. Liviu Librescu, a 76-year-old Holocaust survivor and aeronautical engineering professor, blocked the door of his classroom in Norris Hall at Virginia Tech so that his students could escape through the windows.
One month later, on the shloshim of his death, the University of Washington Chabad brought Rabbi Shlomo Yaffe to the UW campus for a memorial lecture in Librescu's honor that looked at, among other things, how his actions should be viewed through a Jewish lens.
Shlomo Yaffe serves as rabbi at Congregation Agudas Achim in West Hartford, Conn. and the founding director of the Institute for Jewish Literacy and the founder of the Connecticut Symposium on Contemporary Legal Issues and Jewish Law in Hartford. He is well known for his ability to make Jewish mysticism accessible to people to make use of it in daily life.
After studying rocket science and WWII history, Yaffe turned to Talmudic law and Hassidic philosophy. He has written and lectured on the Judaic perspective of contemporary, legal, scientific and social issues. Rabbi Yaffe is also an expert on secular law and legal ethics who serves as a legal consultant and lecturer for the New York Legal Assistance Group.
Rabbi Yaffe began his talk with the question: "From the standpoint of Jewish ethics and law, did [Prof. Librescu] do the right thing? He put himself against the door, which someone could, and did ultimately, shoot through and kill him. Was he really supposed to give his life for others?
"This is not such a simple question," Yaffe explained, "because if someone's life is no less valuable than your own, then it's certainly no more valuable than your own."
He promised to answer that question, but first
took an hour-long digression that began with the question of how German society, with its long traditions of scientific and philosophical leadership, could emerge in the 1930s as the author of the Holocaust, one of the most horrific moments in modern human history.
"How did a very large group of people from a highly developed society...engage in and justify such a pervasive, long term abuse of ethics? The Holocaust was not the passionate, vicious bloodletting of the mob that ultimately runs itself out," he said. "It was a cold and calculated societal choice devoted to the extermination, destruction and utter and complete cruelty and disregard, first of all to Jews, but also many others."
His answer was that the people making those choices believed that they had evidence that the Jews, the Gypsies, the handicapped, homosexuals and other outcast groups were a blight on the society and, that by removing them, they were improving the world as a whole. Then, like the teacher that he is, he led the dozen or so people that had come to hear him on a journey of exploration into the essential question of what makes a human life inherently worth preserving.
"There's this premise that we have that people have a fundamental right to live, that people have a fundamental right to express themselves, that people have a fundamental right to equal opportunities," he said. "The question is: is there really any quantifiable truth to them — can they be proved logically, or should we say scientifically?
"Scientifically, differences between human beings on a racial or national level are far less than their similarities. But that doesn't mean anything because someone else might have a different way of looking at things and, like the German scientists of the '20s and '30s, come to the conclusion that the shapes of skulls and the colors of skin and the like may be terribly important," Yaffe said. "And who's to say that it couldn't happen again?"
Once an idea becomes entrenched in the scientific or popular beliefs, he explained, the data tend to be read in a way that support that belief.
Making a case analogous to the anti-Semitism of Nazi Germany, he said, "I could identify any one of five racial groups that have a much higher rate of indictment, convictions and incarcerations for murder. There are certain minorities that commit crimes and get convicted for them at a much higher rate than other minorities. It probably has nothing to do with race and a lot to do with history....These statistics do exist.
"Put yourself in the shoes of these German scientists," Yaffe said. "Once you believe that this group contains a greater percentage of social pathologies and that once you get rid of them you get rid of the social pathologies ... I ask all of you, is there any reason why we should not exterminate this group?"
His comments counter the ethical calculus in Jewish tradition that the fundamental belief that human beings are made in the image of God and, as such, each and every one of us is imbued with an inherent value that cannot be reduced by the "greater good" for society as a whole.
"We can argue from today to tomorrow about God and religion and everything, but if you do not bring in a being that is the source of everything whose purest expression is in a human being, a being that assigns a special value to the human being, a being that says its most profound and indivisible irreducible expression is in a human being, then you can never, ever find a reason why I should not do something wrong to another person," Rabbi Yaffe said.
"The only thing that would seem to guarantee such a thing is that there is a sensibility that assigns an absolute value as part of itself to the human being. That value says there's nothing more precious than a human life, so I need to do everything I can to protect it and preserve it unless that other person forfeits its life by seeking my destruction."
Under that precept, he said, one person cannot, under Jewish law, sacrifice his own life for another person's, no matter how much better or more deserving they believe that other person to be.
"On the other hand," he said, drawing back to where he began, with the sacrifice made by Prof. Librescu, "can someone risk [his] life to save someone else's life? Yes, as long as it's not a definite one-on-one sort of thing. Can someone risk [his] life to save many? It would seem the answer is yes — that answers the original question that we started with."
--
Archived with permission of JTNews.
Original Source: <a href="http://www.jtnews.net/index.php?/news/item/2808/">http://www.jtnews.net/index.php?/news/item/2808/</a>
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eng
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Joel Magalnick - JTNews (editor@jtnews.net)
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Reflections of Virginia Tech
jewish
librescu
reflections
-
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Adriana Seagle
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Daniel E. Loeb / The Philadelphia Jewish Voice
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2007-07-01
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The Jewish community mourns with Virginia Tech.
<i>-- Daniel Loeb</i>
The deadliest campus shooting in the history of the US occurred on Monday, April 16 at Virginia Tech. The tragic shootings at Virginia Tech happened on the day Jews all over the world observe Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, and which is marked in Israel with two minutes of silence, prayer and reflection.
The United States Congress has called for a minute of silence on Friday, April 20 at noon, to remember Monday's victims, as well as the millions of other men and women around the world who have died at the hands of armed madmen and criminals.
Seung-Hui Cho killed 32 people and injured 29 more before taking his own life.
Ironically, one of the Virginia Tech victims, aeronautics professor Liviu Librescu, was a survivor of the Holocaust. He died while barricading his classroom against the gunman, saving the lives of several of his students through his sacrifice on Yom Hashoah.
Librescu, born in 1930 in Ploiesti, Romania, survived the Holocaust in the ghetto of Focsani while his father was interned in the Transnistria labor camp. After the war, he studied Aerospace Engineering at the Polytechnic University of Bucharest and Fluid Mechanics at the Academia de Stiinte din Romania.
He distinguished himself as a researcher at the Institute of Applied Mechanics, Institute of Fluid Mechanics and Institute of Fluid Mechanics and Aerospace Constructions of Academy of Science of Romania. However, then Romanian President Nicolae Ceausescu did not allow him to emigrate to Israel, however, until Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin personally intervened on Prof. Librescu's behalf in 1978.
After making aliyah, Librescu served as a Professor of Aeronautical and Mechanical Engineering at Tel-Aviv University. In 1985, he joined the faculty at Virginia Tech where he distinguished himself as the Virginia Tech professor with the greatest number of publications.
At age 76, Professor Librescu held the door of his classroom shut so that Cho Seung-hui could not enter before his students escaped through the windows. Cho shot Liviu Librescu through the door mortally wounding this Professor considered a hero by his students.
Professor Librescu was <a href="http://www.pjvoice.com/v23/23001vatech.aspx">commended posthumously</a> by the President of Romania with the Star of Romania Order in the grade of Great Cross, "as a token of high appreciation for the entire scientific and universitarian activity, as well as for his heroic acts during the tragic events of April 16th 2007 in the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University campus, when professor Librescu saved his students' lives at the cost of his own".
Rabbi Yossel Kranz announced that the new Chabad House at Virginia Tech will be named for Professor Liviu Librescu. "Professor Librescu's final act of heroism will be eternally memorialized in the life-affirming activities of the new center," said Rabbi Kranz. The professor's widow Mrs. Marilena Librescu and their sons Ari and Joe shared with Rabbi Kranz their wishes that Librescu House serve as a home of healing, joy and spiritual fulfillment to Virginia Tech's Jewish students.
--
© 2007. Permission is hereby granted to redistribute this issue of The Philadelphia Jewish Voice or (unless specified otherwise) any of the articles therein in their full original form provided these same rights are conveyed to the reader and subscription information to The Philadelphia Jewish Voice is provided. Subscribers should be directed to <a href="http://www.pjvoice.com/Subscribe.htm">http://www.pjvoice.com/Subscribe.htm</a>.
Original Source: The Philadelphia Jewish Voice
<a href="http://www.pjvoice.com/v23/23001vatech.aspx">http://www.pjvoice.com/v23/23001vatech.aspx</a>
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eng
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Daniel E.Loeb (daniel.loeb@verizon.net)
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Holocaust Survivor Slaughtered On Yom Hashoah
community
jewish
librescu
mourns
prayer