A representative of Romanian President Traian Basescu gave a national medal in Israel on Friday to the family of a Romanian-born Virginia Tech professor who saved his students from a rampaging gunman Monday.

The presidential representative attended Liviu Librescu's funeral in Ra'anana on Friday and bestowed on his widow and children the Order of the Star of Romania for his bravery and his contributions to science, Israel Radio reported.

Librescu, an internationally respected aeronautics engineer and lecturer, was an engineering professor and Holocaust survivor who left Romania for Israel and then the United States.

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Witnesses to Monday's shooting said Librescu blocked the door to his classroom with his body so students could escape the assailant by jumping out windows. The 76-year-old professor was shot to death in the deadliest shooting rampage in U.S. history - which coincided with Holocaust Remembrance Day - and became one of 32 victims of gunman Cho Seung-Hui.

"He gave his life for his students," Brooklyn Assemblyman Dov Hikind told mourners at a Brooklyn funeral home during a memorial service Wednesday. "It is the ultimate sacrifice, and the ultimate goodness, after all that he went through in his life."

The neighborhood's Jewish community volunteered to hold the service before Librescu's remains were flown to Israel for burial.

The professor's wife, Marlena Librescu, arrived with Israeli consular officials. She was greeted with bear hugs from strangers who praised her husband's bravery.

Although she was initially composed, she broke down as someone 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.

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

Liviu Librescu taught at Virginia Tech for 20 years and had an international reputation for his work in aeronautical engineering.

"His research has enabled better aircraft, superior composite materials, and more robust aerospace structures," said Ishwar K. Puri, the head of the engineering science and mechanics department.

Librescu's son, Joe, said his father's students sent e-mails detailing how the professor saved their lives by.

"My father blocked the doorway with his body and asked the students to flee," Joe Librescu said Tuesday in a telephone interview from his home outside of Tel Aviv. "Students started opening windows and jumping out."

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

After the war, Librescu 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. He was later fired when he requested permission to move to Israel, according to his son.

In 1977, then-prime minister Menachem Begin personally intervened to get the family an emigration permit, the son said.

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

At the Polytechnic University in Bucharest, a picture of the elder Librescu was placed on a table with a candle and flowers.

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