Blumauer Fund Gives Grant to University

A grant of $10,000 has been voted to the Hebrew University in Palestine by the trustees of the Blumauer Fund, established by the will of the late Benjamin Blumauer of Portland, Ore., it was announced yesterday by Dr. A. S. W. Rosenbach, president of the American Friends of the Hebrew University.

In communicating the vote of the Board, one of its members, Roscoe C. Nelson, prominent attorney and civic leader of Portland, Oregon, stated that “all of the Trustees are confident that the Hebrew University is perhaps the finest single accomplishment of our people in a period of centuries, and each of them believes that it is destined to play a critically important part in Jewish cultural development in the years to come.”

The grant was accompanied with the stipulation that the money is to be used for current maintenance in order to help the university meet the strain upon its facilities as the result of the influx of German refugee professors and students.

“Seventeen of the distinguished scientists and other professors dismissed from Germany have recently been added to the faculty of the Hebrew University,” said Dr. Rosenbach, “and the student body has almost tripled.

“In spite of this and other generous gifts the University is constantly receiving,” added Dr. Rosenbach, “the Chancellor, Dr. Magnes, and his board are still faced with the necessity of drastic economies which handicap cruelly the work of the university.

“The salaries, for example, paid to the professors, including some of the most distinguished men in the world of scholarship—men with international reputations — average forty dollars a week. The financial support of the university has come chiefly from America, and the depression here has proved to be a severe drawback to the up-building of the university.”

Among the trustees of the Blumauer Estate who voted the grant to the Hebrew University are the recent Governor of Oregon, Julius L. Meier, and Joseph Simon, prominent citizen and communal leader of Portland.