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Construction on a new facility to hold the Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life at the Bancroft Library will start in a week.

UC Berkeley held a groundbreaking ceremony Tuesday night for the collection, which will be housed in a building at 2121 Allston Way, near Oxford Street. UC President Mark Yudof, UC Berkeley Chancellor Robert Birgeneau, and members of the Jewish community who supported the collection’s predecessor organization, the Judah L. Magnes Museum, were at the celebration.

Many of the speakers compared UC Berkeley’s acquisition of the Magnes Museum to a marriage.

Warren Hellman, a San Francisco businessman, who along with Tad Taube and the Koret Foundation, financed the university’s acquisition of the museum, sang a song about the merger. The tune’s lyrics were based on Woody Guthrie’s “Bound for Glory,” and the chorus refrain was “The Magnes is Bound for Glory at Last.” Hellman played the banjo. Other members of the band included Ron Hendel, the chair of Berkeley’s Jewish Studies Program, Francesco Spagnolo, the Magnes Curator of Collections, Sharon Bernstein, the cantor at Congregation Sha’ar Zahav in San Francisco, and Colleen Browne, a member of The Wronglers, Hellman’s band.

Hendel of the Jewish Studies program crafted a humorous limerick about the Magnes’s wanderings, which he recited Tuesday night. (Hint: shiddich means Jewish marriage.)

There was a museum named Magnes

That decided to seek a new address.

It tried out the city,

The result wasn’t pretty,

But the shiddich with Cal is a success.

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