The S. S. Velasco docked at the port of Los Angeles after a 47-day voyage from Haifa and unloaded 151 large crates containing 33,520 books which will become the foundation of a great Judaica and Hebraica collection at the University of California at Los Angeles.
Chancellor Franklin D. Murphy, who announced the acquisition, said: “This important purchase was made possible by the warm-hearted generosity of Mr. and Mrs. Theodore Cummings of Beverly Hills, and reflects their deep respect for learning and scholarship.” Mr. Cummings is a Beverly Hills businessman, art patron and philanthropist whose two children are graduates of UCLA.
In the collection are such items as Bibles–many of them first editions and rarities–Talmuds and Talmud-commentaries, Rabbinica, rare Hebrew periodicals, modern Hebrew literature, studies and histories of various Jewish communities, an Old Yiddish collection, several hundred books in Rumanian, important dictionaries, and many other such items.
The books were purchased from the firm of Bamberger and Wahrman in Jerusalem, whose clients are to be found all over the world–including the Hebrew National and University Library in Jerusalem, the New York Public Library, the Library of Congress, Brandeis University, Harvard University and the Bibliotheque Nationale in France. The purchase was suggested to University of California at Los Angeles officials by Professor Arnold Band, assistant professor of Hebrew, who is in Jerusalem on sabbatical leave.
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