Prof’s body returning to Israel

The body of Professor Liviu Librescu, a Romania-born Holocaust survivor who was killed in the Virginia Tech shooting rampage, is being returned to Israel for burial. Librescu’s body was released by the local medical examiner’s office and was in New York on Wednesday morning awaiting transport to Israel, according to Yossel Kranz, a Chabad rabbi in Richmond, Va., who helped make arrangements. Librescu had lived in Israel in the late 1970s and into the 1980s.Kranz took the lead Tuesday in communicating the requirements of Jewish tradition to the medical examiner, ensuring that no autopsy was performed and that the body was released for burial as quickly as possible.”We were there in the room monitoring and watching to make sure that everything was done properly, and that the entire body would be returned for burial,” Kranz told JTA. Kranz, whose Richmond home is a 3 1/2-hour drive from the Virginia Tech campus in Blacksburg, helped Jewish and non-Jewish students still reeling from Monday’s killings, which claimed 32 lives as well as the gunman. It was the deadliest shooting in American history.