A total of 403 individual scholarships for students at the Hebrew University, valued at $121,000, was contributed tonight at the first Annual Scopus Award Dinner of the American Friends of the Hebrew University. Joseph M. Mazer, noted community leader, was presented with the first Scopus Award, established as the highest honor that can be given by the American committee. Dr. George S. Wise, chairman of the university’s board of governors, presented the award to Mr. Mazer.
Speaking as chairman of the university’s board of governors, the university’s supreme authority, Dr. Wise stressed that “the Scopus Award brings to mind the high idealism and vision of those who founded the Hebrew University on Mount Scopus at a time when Palestine lacked the most basic economic necessities. Material difficulties and hardships of all kinds could not discourage those very practical visionaries who foresaw that higher education was the indispensable pre-condition for the material as well as the cultural progress of a future Jewish State.”
Other principal speakers included Dr. Abba Hillel Silver; Daniel G. Ross, chairman of the board of the American Friends of the Hebrew University; and Marvin Kratter, who presided. Mr. Mazer, it. his response, said that for him the award is “not a symbol of a task completed, but of a mission still to be accomplished.”
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.