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heidiYesterday was Yom Hashoah - Holocaust Remembrance Day - which has, since the 1950s, been observed five days after the end of Passover, the day of the uprising at the Warsaw ghetto. It is the date on which we remember those who died in the Holocaust, because for almost all of those who were murdered then, we do not know the date on which they died, and as Jews, we need a day on which we can say Kaddish for someone's yahrrzeit (the anniversary of one's death).
And as I've seen in the news today, and on my flist, a Holocaust survivor was killed at Virginia Tech yesterday. Liviu Librescu, a Romania-born engineer and mathematician, blocked the door with his body and told his students to flee and he saved lives and he was murdered.
He wasn't the only one, of course, who gave his life for others yesterday, but the irony of the fact that he was a survivor of the Shoash - and then was murdered on Yom Hashoah - makes my head spin. Thank God for all the heroes yesterday, and all the heroes through the ages, whose lives give life to dozens and hundreds and thousands and millions as the years go by.
As far as the school not going into lockdown, I understand why they didn't, when the murders happened in the dorm, but I hope that this causes schools to send emails more rapidly in the future when something happens on or near a campus - and I've seen a few people comment that the schools send emails to students' and teachers' "official .edu" accounts, which a lot of people don't use - I hope that after this, schools set up to text students and email them at secondary/tertiary accounts in emergency situations - not just things like this, but also if a school is closed because of snow or storm or anything like that. I've pushed for a similar type of notification system in our public schools, and they have it by phone now - we get a call if there's something Big going on, or just to notify us of upcoming events and such (and while I was writing this, I got one regarding an event next week!); it works, as a system, pretty well. It should be implementable on school-wide scales.
And as I've seen in the news today, and on my flist, a Holocaust survivor was killed at Virginia Tech yesterday. Liviu Librescu, a Romania-born engineer and mathematician, blocked the door with his body and told his students to flee and he saved lives and he was murdered.
He wasn't the only one, of course, who gave his life for others yesterday, but the irony of the fact that he was a survivor of the Shoash - and then was murdered on Yom Hashoah - makes my head spin. Thank God for all the heroes yesterday, and all the heroes through the ages, whose lives give life to dozens and hundreds and thousands and millions as the years go by.
As far as the school not going into lockdown, I understand why they didn't, when the murders happened in the dorm, but I hope that this causes schools to send emails more rapidly in the future when something happens on or near a campus - and I've seen a few people comment that the schools send emails to students' and teachers' "official .edu" accounts, which a lot of people don't use - I hope that after this, schools set up to text students and email them at secondary/tertiary accounts in emergency situations - not just things like this, but also if a school is closed because of snow or storm or anything like that. I've pushed for a similar type of notification system in our public schools, and they have it by phone now - we get a call if there's something Big going on, or just to notify us of upcoming events and such (and while I was writing this, I got one regarding an event next week!); it works, as a system, pretty well. It should be implementable on school-wide scales.
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Date: 2007-04-17 11:09 pm (UTC)You are quite right about notification and I hope adjustments can be made to make it more efficient and, consequently, safer.