Top Stories

NEW YORK (CBS/AP) ― Liviu Librescu, who survived the Holocaust to become a world-class scientist, was remembered Wednesday at a Brooklyn funeral home as a hero who saved his Virginia Tech students from a rampaging gunman.

"He gave his life for his students," Brooklyn Assemblyman Dov Hikind told mourners. "It is the ultimate sacrifice, and the ultimate goodness, after all that he went through in his life."

On Monday, the professor blocked the doorway to his classroom with his body so his students could escape the gunman by jumping out windows. The 76-year-old teacher was shot to death, one of 32 victims killed by gunman Cho Seung-Hui.

On Wednesday afternoon, Librescu's body was brought to a funeral home in Brooklyn's Borough Park neighborhood -- home to a large Jewish population. Members of the community volunteered to hold the service for Librescu before his remains were taken to Kennedy Airport for a flight to Israel.

The professor's wife, Marlena Librescu, arrived at the service with Israeli consular officials -- greeted with bear hugs from strangers young and old who praised her husband's bravery.

Composed and offering a smile, she finally broke down and wept as a Jewish community member handed her her husband's golden wedding band -- 42 years after their marriage.

"He saved them. He saved them," she said quietly of her husband's students as she slipped the band on her finger, next to
her own.

She was accompanying his remains to Israel for his burial, planned for Thursday.

She and their sons, Joe and Arie, are the only immediate survivors, and Marlena Librescu does not plan to stay in Virginia, where her husband had been an internationally respected aeronautics engineer and lecturer for 20 years.

"He was a very human person. He wanted to help everybody," his wife said after the service.

Librescu's students sent e-mails to his family recounting his actions, said his son, Joe Librescu, speaking by telephone from his home near Tel Aviv.

Librescu, 76, had known tragedy since childhood.

When his native Romania joined forces with Nazi Germany in World War II, the young Librescu was interned in a labor camp, and then sent along with his family and thousands of other Jews to a central ghetto in the city of Focsani, his son said. Hundreds of thousands of Romanian Jews were killed during the war.

Librescu later found work at a government aerospace company. But his career was stymied in the 1970s because he refused to swear allegiance to the Communist regime, his son said, and he was later fired when he requested permission to move to Israel.

In 1977, according to his son, Israel's then-Prime Minister Menachem Begin personally intervened to get the family an emigration permit, and they left for Israel in 1978.

Librescu left Israel for Virginia in 1985 for a sabbatical year, but eventually made the move permanent, said Joe Librescu, who himself studied at Virginia Tech from 1989 to 1994.

In Romania, the academic community also mourned Librescu's death.

"It is a great loss," said Ecaterina Andronescu, rector of the Polytechnic University in Bucharest. "We have immense consideration for the way he reacted and defended his students with his life."

At the Polytechnic University, his picture was placed on a table with a candle and flowers. "We remember him as a great specialist in aeronautics. He left behind hundreds of prestigious papers," said one of the professors, Nicolae Serban Tomescu.

Librescu was published extensively and received numerous awards and NASA grants for his work.

"His work was his life in a sense," Joe Librescu said.

(© 2007 CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. The Associated Press contributed to this report.)