Special to WJW

Quiet crying could be heard in Temple Rodef Shalom's sanctuary Sunday evening as clergy read and sang words of comfort and congregants lit memorial candles for the 32 people murdered at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg last week.

The event, "A Service of Healing and Unity for Our Community," organized by the Jewish Community Relations Council and the Jewish Federation of Greater Washington, was held at the Falls Church Reform synagogue. It drew some 200 people, many of whom had personal ties to the university.

"The tragic and incomprehensible loss of life that took place on the campus of Virginia Tech on Monday has shaken us to our very core," Rodef Shalom's senior rabbi, Amy Schwartzman, said in her opening prayer. "We are all suffering, we are all in need of one another. This week, each one of us has felt like a mourner. Some of our children go [to Virginia Tech], some of our neighbors go there, some of our congregants go there Š we join in grief and sympathy with all the friends and family members of the victims."

Following Schwartzman's opening words, the synagogue's cantor, Michael Shochet, sang Hannah Senesh's "Eli, Eli," a poem whose words have been set to music: "My God, my God, I pray that these things never end/ The sand and the sea, the rush of the waters;/ The crash of the heavens,/ The human prayer."

Next were short speeches by rabbis from local shuls. Rabbi Leila Gal Berner of Kol Ami-Northern Virginia Reconstructionist Community and a professor in the Department of Religion at George Washington University, read a short poem, a eulogy that she had written for Romanian-born Holocaust survivor Liviu Librescu, 76, the Virginia Tech engineering and math lecturer who barricaded the door to his classroom to save his students from being shot. In so doing, he was shot and killed himself. Librescu, who had left Romania for Israel, was buried in the Jewish state last week.

"They say the Messiah is supposed to come/then a deeply troubled young man shoots and shoots and shoots Š ," read Gal Berner.

"And a gentle-faced professor/ who has survived, survived, survived/ the charnel houses of Europe/ holds a door tight with all his strength/ and saves, saves, saves/ some of the younger ones/ before he no longer survives.

"Was this gentle-faced one/ The Messiah who came/ for just an instant to remind us of acts of courage/ of selflessness/ of kindness beyond measure?"

For many audience members, tears came when Cantor Sharon Steinberg of Alexandria's Beth El Hebrew Congregation sang a rendition of Doug Cotler's "A Rose in December."

Tears flowed, too, during the candlelighting ceremony when participants holding slips of paper bearing the names of the Virginia Tech victims lit white floating candles and when accounts were read of those on campus when the killings were taking place.

Seung-Hui Cho, 23, the Virginia Tech killer, "was a smart kid; he knew what he was doing," said Rodef Shalom congregant Terry Gross, reading a letter written for the memorial service by her daughter, Lindsay, who attends Virginia Tech and stayed on campus last weekend.

"That said, I don't want to talk about him anymore," Gross, reading her daughter's letter, continued. "I'm at a loss of words to be able to write this without having been injured myself, or even having a single friend injured. I know am blessed. People I have not talked to in six or seven years are calling to see how I am. Š Life is precious, and I know now that it can be taken away from you in an instant."

Jesse Gorin, a senior Tech student whose family attends Rodef Shalom, came home from Blacksburg for the memorial. Since the massacre, he said, "I have not stopped wearing the school's [colors of] burnt orange and Chicago maroon."

Like many of the ceremony's attendees, he wore a small ribbon with those colors pinned to his shirt.

Alumnus Bruce Kaplan said he attended the event as a stand-in for friend and Virginia Tech Hillel director Sue Kurtz, who could not be there. "I'm on the Hillel board at the school," said the Burke resident who belongs to Congregation Adat Reyim in Springfield. "My first reaction when I heard about the shooting was to make sure that everyone I knew was safe, because I still know a lot of people there. It was like Blacksburg's 9/11 ‹ I couldn't get hold of anyone for a while."

Speaking after the event, Anita Thornton, Rodef Shalom's program director, called Sunday's program "a beautiful, moving tribute."

"It was wonderful that so many area congregants came together to support the community," she said.