For your particular situation I would recommend creating your own object that would keep needed static value(s). You can populate it during initialization of your application or when that data is requested for the first time.
As for the comparative perfromance, your best case is that your Hibernate-based data access layer would perfrom as good as JDBC, or the perfromance degradation would not affect overall user expereince. Hibernate is used to speed up development and enhance maintainability, not to get a perfromance edge over JDBC.
