1 20 3 Document A resource containing textual data. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre text. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Sara Hood Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Jeremy Stern Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2007-08-08 Description An account of the resource <b>Outside the Box with the Managing Editor</b> By: Jeremy Stern Posted: 5/7/07 I have been looking forward all year to writing this, my final column. A last hurrah before I graduate. An opportunity to thank all those who have helped me get to where I am today: my professors, parents, wife, God, yadda yadda yadda... But then 27 college students and five of their professors were gunned down in Virginia, and Yeshiva students barely stirred. It took a day and a half before any sort of response took place on either of our undergraduate campuses; two days before a respectable, public commemoration. On Monday morning the blood of 32 victims smeared the walls of dormitories and classrooms at V-Tech. Not until Tuesday night did fewer than two dozen Yeshiva students find it important enough to take twenty minutes out of Night Seder for a prayer rally. I know that people are murdered every day. 104 American soldiers died in Iraq during the month of April alone, and who knows how many tens of thousands are suffering today in Darfur. But the Middle East and Northern Africa are distant, with unfamiliar victims with whom we have difficulty relating. That leaves us with no excuse when the deadliest shooting in U.S. history is perpetrated on an American college campus. How can we explain our silence, when thousands of our peers at NYU, Columbia, Brandeis, and Penn responded within 24 hours with arrangements for candlelight vigils, memorial services, solidarity rallies, and condolence books? If there is one thing that we do well, it&#39;s Tehillim (Psalms) rallies. Why was one not organized for the Main Beit Midrash at 12 p.m. on Tuesday? I was appalled at the lackadaisical response from some student leaders to requests for immediate action. Lest you think urgent coordination was impossible, by 6 p.m. on Monday afternoon - only a few hours after the last bullet was fired - the Yeshiva Security Department sent out a blast email notifying the campus community that, in conjunction with the New York Police Department, precautions were being taken to heighten overall campus security. On the other hand, President Joel&#39;s sincere and eloquent email to the president of Virginia Tech took more than two days before arriving in our Inboxes. (For comparison, 29 ystuds were sent out in the interim.) We are talking about college students and professors. These were not foreign people with aspirations wholly different from our own. At the very least, this tragedy should arouse our concern for our own campus safety. Massacres like this are notorious for copycats who yearn to have their names on the front page of newspapers nationwide, and Yeshiva, as a yeshiva, could be a primary target. But, I expect more from us than self-centered concern. We must empathize because these victims were part of the greater collegiate community. As sensitive human beings, and as sensitized religious Jews, we must feel their pain because of our shared experience. Just as we expect more from Israel than any other country to serve as a safe-haven for Sudan&#39;s refugees who have fled for their lives, we must expect more from ourselves because this tragedy occurred to people who are much like us. If we are not empathetic, then how does that speak of the enhanced morality which our Torah learning is meant to instill within us? Sure, some of us eventually prayed, and a meaningful moment of silence was held at the Town Hall Meeting, but what was our initial instinct? Were we shocked and gripped by pain? Did we stop what we were doing and, perhaps, cry? What explains our anesthetized state? The problem is with our identification, or lack thereof. Because some of us do not view ourselves as members of a "real" university or a "real" college, we fail to identify with the broader community of college students. Yeshiva certainly provides a distinctive undergraduate experience compared with that of other universities, but that dissimilarity makes it no less real. Were we only to appreciate our differences as attributes, would we begin to realize that a world exists, of which we are an integral part, outside of the bubble at 185th and Amsterdam or 34th and Lex. We have a lot to be proud of. When I transferred here from Brandeis five semesters ago, I could not imagine the opportunities which Yeshiva would provide for me. The relationships which I have established with peers and professors, the academic excellence to which I have been exposed, and the enriching environment which has encouraged me to thrive have truly exceeded my expectations. Every Wednesday of the school year for the past four semesters I have led campus tours for prospective students and their parents. I conclude every tour as follows. Since arriving on campus almost four years ago, President Joel has inspired all aspects of the university to no longer subsist on mediocrity but rather to strive for greatness. I consider myself fortunate to attend Yeshiva now and not four years ago, because I have benefited tremendously from President Joel&#39;s initiatives and leadership. However, I am truly jealous of the students who will be here in another four years, because the school will certainly be that much better. I am confident that President Joel&#39;s vision of the big tent will soon materialize, with the student body&#39;s recognition that it cannot stand idly by while blood is spilled on other college campuses. -- Original Source: <a href=http://media.www.yucommentator.com/media/storage/paper652/news/2007/05/07/Editorials/Collegiate.Solidarity-2892422.shtml> The Commentator - May 7, 2007</a> Language A language of the resource eng Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Zev Eleff <eleff@yu.edu> Title A name given to the resource Collegiate Solidarity community response editorial outreach relating yeshiva university Document A resource containing textual data. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre text. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Sara Hood Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Matt William Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2007-08-08 Description An account of the resource By: Matt Williams Posted: 5/7/07 On April 18, 2007 President Richard Joel hosted this semester&#39;s town hall meeting on the Beren Campus at 215 Lexington. The assembly was attended by more than one hundred students, and although the vast majority of students were from Stern College for Women, a few men from Yeshiva College made the trek to the mid-afternoon gathering. In years past there have been two events, one held on the Wilf Campus and the other on the Beren Campus. "There was a scheduling conflict this year," said one administrator, and the meeting that was supposed to take place on the Wilf Campus was cancelled. "To dismiss something as important as a town hall meeting with a simple and solvable scheduling conflict is ridiculous," one student said. Although there was no town hall meeting on the Wilf Campus this semester, the President&#39;s office did decide to hold meetings for any interested student on Monday April 30, 2007. This event came in the wake of the tragic shootings at Virginia Tech. President Joel offered his condolences and his thoughts about being charged with the safekeeping of Yeshiva University students. From there he discussed the importance of a learning community and how education should not stop once one is outside of class. His speech placed the meeting in context, implying that all the audience was working toward a common goal and subtly forcing even the most harsh of accusations to either remain unsaid or to be phrased in the best possible way. The town hall meeting began with an introduction by the dean of Stern College for Women, Dr. Karen Bacon. She spoke about how President Joel is unique among university presidents. "He makes himself available... [he is] a visible presence on campus." After the president&#39;s aforementioned speech, he opened the floor to questions. Many of the questions were aimed at the disconcerting conflict between the university&#39;s expansion policy and its lack of available housing and classrooms. The president informed the audience that a new building in midtown will be open in the fall of 2007 and that, although Stern is located in an expensive area, the university has made the commitment to keep them there. The president also responded to a question dealing with the apparent apathy for the Virginia Tech situation in the Yeshiva student body. President Joel responded that, although it is not complete apathy since there was a prayer rally and a blog for condolences, there is a real and tangible problem which is the strict definition of community inherent at YU. He acknowledged that "within our bubble of Washington Heights" it is sometimes difficult to view those in the beyond as our brothers, but it is a challenge that bequeaths us all to undertake. The last question that was raised centered around the diverse religious elements within the student body. Simply, should YU be a university for only those orthodox Jews who subscribe to the same understanding of secular studies? President Joel answered that although that is the ideal, the truth is that students who enter college really do not know how they are going to end up. While they search for their particular path, Yeshiva University can provide them with the guidance of some of the greatest rabbis in the world, the shelter of a multi-million dollar campus, and arm them with an outstanding education that can help them understand and appreciate their world. -- Original Source: <a href=http://media.www.yucommentator.com/media/storage/paper652/news/2007/05/07/News/Pres-Mourns.V.tech.Tragedy.At.Town.Hall.Meeting-2889541.shtml>The YU Commentator - May 7, 2007</a> Language A language of the resource eng Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available YU Commentator Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Zev Eleff <eleff@yu.edu> Title A name given to the resource Pres. Mourns V.Tech Tragedy at Town Hall Meeting administrator comments campus response mourning yeshiva university Document A resource containing textual data. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre text. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Sara Hood Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Yoni Noble Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2007-08-08 Description An account of the resource By: Yoni Noble Posted: 5/7/07 April 16th, 2007, the awful day when a disturbed student killed 32 people at Virginia Tech, will be forever etched in the Jewish consciousness. Liviu Librescu, professor of aeronautical engineering and a survivor of the Holocaust, sacrificed his own life for those of his students. The magnitude of this act is a cause for mournful reflection on a Jewish life cut short. Liviu Librescu was born in 1930 to a Jewish family in Ploiesti, Romania. During World War II, when Romania joined forces with Nazi Germany, he was imprisoned in a forced labor camp. Subsequently he was sent, along with his family and thousands of others, to a ghetto in the city of Focsani about 100 miles from his home. Hundreds of thousands of Jews from across Romania died in the Focsani Ghetto and in Transnistria, a Romanian-run Nazi killing field where Librescu&#39;s father, a lawyer, perished. Liviu survived the horrors of the Focsani Ghetto and the Holocaust and nobly committed his life to academia, studying aerospace engineering at the Polytechnic University of Bucharest, where he received both his undergraduate degree in 1952 and his Masters in 1953. In 1969 he received his Ph.D. in fluid Mechanics from Academia de Stiinte din Romania. Liviu Librescu was a brilliant mind and quickly established himself as a top researcher at the Bucharest Institute of Applied Mechanics and the Academy of Science of Romania. Yet his refusal to swear allegiance to the destructive Communist regime in Romania ultimately left him jobless. Without means to support his wife, Marlene, and two sons, Joe and Arie, Librescu tried to leave Romania for Israel. But under the Romanian communist regime Jews were not allowed to emigrate. In 1978 the Romanian government finally permitted Liviu to leave, but only after a direct request was made by the Prime Minister of Israel--Menachem Begin--to Romanian President Nicolae Ceausescu. From 1979 to 1986 Librescu was a Professor of Aeronautical and Mechanical Engineering at Tel-Aviv University and Haifa&#39;s Technion. In 1985 he took a sabbatical from Tel Aviv University to research and teach at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in Blacksburg, Virginia. He quickly became a vital part of the School of Engineering Science and Mechanics, and in 1986 decided to make Blacksburg and Virginia Tech his full-time home. These extraordinary accomplishments in the face of such tribulations made Livui Librescu a hero to those who knew him. But his actions on the morning of April 16, 2007 shine through as beacon of everything that embodies his heroic spirit. On that frightful morning when a deranged gunman chose Librescu&#39;s classroom as a target for his heinous, senseless murdering spree, Liviu Librescu barricaded himself against the classroom door in an attempt to lock the gunman out. He told his students to flee through a classroom window while he threw his body against the door. Librescu was fatally shot, but the gunman never managed to gain access and no student in the classroom was harmed. Following the tragedy, representatives of the Borough Park-based organization Chesed Shel Emes quickly contacted the morgue holding Librescu&#39;s remains. Before an autopsy could be performed, Librescu was brought to Brooklyn for a levaya (funeral service). Though Liviu had no family in Borough Park, hundreds of Jews packed the tiny funeral chapel to grieve, console, and, celebrate a life nobly lived. After stirring remarks by New York Assemblyman Dov Hikind, Librescu&#39;s body was flown to Israel for burial. The death of this great man forces us to reexamine our own grasp on life. What inspires a man to willingly forfeit his life in defense of another? Branded with the memories of the Holocaust, Librecu understood that life is fleeting and transitory. The end can come at any moment, without prior notice. When given the opportunity to save many lives , Liviu unflinchingly sacrificed his own, concretizing the boundless devotion he carried for humanity. Surely such a man deserves concrete memorials, at the very least a postage stamp or a place renamed in his honor. His name must soar as an inspiration for future generations -- not just for Jews, but for all. -- Original Source:<a href=http://media.www.yucommentator.com/media/storage/paper652/news/2007/05/07/Opinion/Liviu.Librescu.19302007-2890044.shtml> The Commentator - May 7, 2007</a> Language A language of the resource eng Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available The Commentator Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Zev Eleff <eleff@yu.edu> Title A name given to the resource Liviu Librescu: 1930-2007 liviu librescu obituary response of jewish community yeshiva university