Louise Bergman was a woman with distinctive qualities, remembers longtime friend Marie-Louise Cavagnaro. Dark-eyed and diminutive, the vivacious transplant from Eastern Europe spoke five languages and loved the symphony and opera.

"We had a lot in common," says Cavagnaro, who met Bergman in 1974 when the two worked for a San Francisco insurance company. "We had both traveled in Europe. We liked most of the same music. We went to art galleries."

In other respects, they were very different. Bergman was intensely frugal, never spending the extra dimes it took to buy a Sunday morning paper. "I would give her mine," Cavagnaro recalls.

That frugality was partly due to a turbulent, uncertain past. Born in Lustk, Poland (now Ukraine) in 1913, Bergman was still a young woman when the Nazis invaded the country. Her mother and sister, as well as other relatives and friends, were killed by the occupiers. She managed to escape to Sweden, passing herself off as German to avoid persecution. She later immigrated to America, settling in San Francisco not knowing a soul.

A resident of the Russian Hill neighborhood, Bergman saved much of the modest income she earned as a bookkeeper. But if she skimped on Sunday papers and other sundries, it wasn’t out of thriftiness alone; she had, it seems, a larger purpose in mind. Before her death in 2002, Bergman executed a holographic (handwritten) will leaving the bulk of her estate to medical research at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the University of California. UCSF expects to receive a bequest of more than $100,000 from her estate.

Bergman stated in her will: "I humbly ask that these gifts be in memory of my family which perished during the cruel times in Poland. [Expressly], I would like to honor my beloved mother Bella Wachs Rosenberg."

It was her wish that the bequest be used to help "eradicate illnesses, causing pain and misery to millions of people here in our country and all over the world."

For information on making a planned gift to UCSF, contact Dan Riley at 415/476-1745 or driley@support.ucsf.edu.