Hier ruht unsere teure und geliebte Tochter, Schwester und Cousine Leonora,

Tochter von Manuel dos Santos Lourenco selig und Sylvia Wallinger

Lissabon 11. 3. 1981 -- Innsbruck 27. 9. 2001

Speech by Sylvia Wallinger, held on 27 Sep. 2015 at a memorial at the Jewish cemetery Innsbruck

Dear All Present,

First I would like to thank you from my heart for your time and energy to have come here to be at Leonora's grave and to gather in loving memory.

It is after much effort that we have succeeded after the death of Leonora's father in Lisbon on 1 August 2009 to bring Leonora's earthly remains from the Lourenco family grave in Sintra to the Innsbruck Jewish cemetery and bury her among us.

I must especially welcome the members of the Jewish community present here and thank the community that after the elimination of many obstacles permission for the burial my daughter could be given in this silent and so noble place of Jewish spirituality.

Today 14 years ago, at 18.27, in the Innsbruck clinic Leonora, twenty years old, after a year of fighting for her life in intensive care died. Many of you present, who supported her during her leukemia disease until the end, have suffered with her and sometimes laughed with her, were after her death at the Haller cemetery, some also visited her former grave in Sintra, Portugal.

Many of you present and also those who cannot be physically present on this day, but send their greetings, their memory and their prayers have a clear picture of Leonora in mind, but not all of us here have known her personally.

This now gives us the opportunity to raise Leonora’s nature, her work and wish for a short time to lift us mentally and I, as the person who indeed was closest to her, but she did not necessarily know best, would for all, who feel touched by her, to recall a memory trace aware that for each of us, depending on the image that we have of Leonora or she had made, may produce a lasting, positive impact.
 
Leonora had wished that a book should be written about them and their illness, to let the inner connection with life itself and especially with their enthusiastic Medizinertum even beyond her death.
 
This book was never written
 
But by today's date at my request, a Leonora website online has been set up that I approved, with images and text, including Leonora's medical report from June 2001, apart from the last part, was not written in her lifetime.

In this way, Leonora (or Leo) can arise for all of us in a spiritual presence, if we want to enter into a spiritual connection and internalized ideas about it with her.

Leonora was a person with many faces and at core very bright, always held by her personality, so that all who had to do with her thought they knew in their respective way, because they could be like a mirror.
 
Leonora was always changeable and unchangeable alike and had from very early on the full potential of her talents and facilities, so that she could still achieve, in the prime of her young female life, maturity and mellowness of age because of her terminal illness.
 
Zeev Mitzrabh will now say the prayers.
 
While we now dwell for a few minutes in silence, be it standing, either in memory even walking around, I also ask Leonora’s father, my dear husband, Manuel Lourenco, to be commemorate dying 7 years following the death of his daughter of cancer and died in agony after only nine months.

If I may sum up the message what I want to get across as Leonora’s mother, in two quotes , is as follows:

1. "Celebrate life in all its manifestations!"
2. "Celebrate your own precious birth!"