It’s been a week since the tragic shootings at Virginia Tech, and the world continues to react. We know about the students who died and the disturbed killer. We know how Professor Liviu Librescu, who survived the Holocaust era and years of living under the threat of terror in Israel, blocked the classroom
door with his body, enabling the escape of his engineering students. On Yom Hashoah. Only in America.
Over the last week, nearly every blog I've read has invoked Librescu's memory and urged readers to reflect on his life and to do good works in his memory. On Facebook, a social networking site popular with students of all ages, over 67 groups have sprung up to express solidarity with the Virginia Tech students and in honor of the fallen professor, with names like "In memory of Professor Liviu Librescu who saved his students at Virginia T" and "Remember Liviu Librescu." The combined membership of these groups is well past 15,000 students. Even those who have no real connection to the school have adopted its logo as their Facebook profile picture in identification with a population that was plunged unexpectedly and unfairly into mourning.
Although no Jewish students were reported killed in the shootings, the Jewish community has rallied around the campus and its surviving students. According to the Hillel Web site, www.hillel.org/about/news/2007/apr/virginiatech_april172007.htm, the day after the shootings, Virginia Tech Hillel Executive Director Sue Kurtz addressed 10,000 participants in a convocation featuring President George Bush, Virginia Gov. Timothy Kaine, university administrators and representatives of other faiths in an attempt to bring the wounded community together. Hillel added communal meals and opportunities to talk. United Jewish Communities (http://ujc.org/) made an emergency grant of $10,000.
As Jews we live within this culture of memory, where education is a holy pursuit and those who die in service to education or various freedoms become martyred on a level that is almost religious. And this week, which contains Holocaust Remembrance Day, Israel Memorial Day and Israel Independence Day – and also falls during the Omer, a traditional post-Passover period of Jewish mourning – is all about the perpetuation of memory and the conversion of loss and grief into productivity and rebuilding.
Maybe T.S. Eliot was right and "April is the cruellest month." Maybe it's just coincidence, but at least for this year, the month that birthed Hitler and gave us the Columbine massacre has reaffirmed its dreadful literary legacy.
