Jewish Roots : Genealogy: A festival at Temple Beth Am includes displays about 19th-Century immigrants and oral histories of those who remember the passage to America.

When Laura H. Klein’s mother was in her 70s, she tried telling her daughter the stories behind the many old photographs she had gathered throughout her life. But Klein recalls feeling that the tales telegraphed her mother’s death, and so she shrank from them.

Not until her mother died at age 78 did Klein begin to study the pictures with the story-less faces that stared back at her, thus beginning to explore her roots.

“You came from somewhere,” Klein said. “The people who came before you struggled, shored you up, made you what you are. The only way to understand that is through genealogy.”

Understanding one’s forbears and how they have contributed to legacies handed down through generations became Klein’s passion after her mother’s death. To that end, she chaired a genealogical festival last weekend at Temple Beth Am, a large conservative synagogue on La Cienega Boulevard.

“From Yankel to Yankee” was the name of the gathering-- Yankel being the Yiddish form of Jacob, a common name among the turn-of-the-century Jewish immigrants. It featured the screening of a dozen videotaped oral histories by temple members, live klezmer music and re-creations of early 20th-Century Ellis Island and of Hester and Delancey streets on New York’s Lower East Side.

Also on hand were historical exhibits on loan from the Ellis Island Museum, and genealogists to help look up family names.

The extravaganza was partly a celebration of Ellis Island’s centennial, complete with imitation passports stamped with “ Mazel Tov “ by an inspector wearing period attire.

But the festival also served to highlight a growing interest in genealogy among Jews.

“This is a generation that wants to know,” said Klein, one of the founding members of the Jewish Genealogical Society of Los Angeles, which had just 10 members when it was founded 15 years ago and now has 400.

Klein, meanwhile, has made a career of her avocation. She has been teaching genealogy at the University of Judaism for 12 years. And with the help of the extensive archives kept by the Mormon church in Los Angeles, she has traced her own family to 1733 in Poland.

For many of the 3,000 people who attended the festival at Temple Beth Am, the opportunity to explore their roots was a powerful emotional experience.

With hot dog in hand, Jack Colker, who played the role of the inspector stamping imitation passports, said: “My parents came from Russia and Romania after World War I. When you think about how our parents came here from other countries across the ocean, not speaking the language--God, they were brave people.”

Ann Gorrin, a native of rural Poland, was one of the temple members whose taped oral history was shown. “The night before we left for Warsaw, there was an emotional party for my mother,” she said in her account of her family’s emigration in 1928, when she was a child. “All the Jews came. It was a lovely experience and the next morning we left by horse and wagon for Warsaw. We came over on a luxury liner and traveled second or third class. We all spoke Yiddish, and it was fine except that we couldn’t eat. It wasn’t kosher. So we ate a lot of bread and butter.”

Another native of Poland, Yona Nadelman, was on hand to amplify her oral history as it was shown. She told of her escape at the beginning of World War II to a Gentile’s home about 15 miles from the death camp at Auschwitz. A young child when the war began, she stayed at the home until the war ended. When her father, who had been a political prisoner in Siberia, found her, she did not recognize him because his hair was white.

Everyone in her extended family but her mother, father and a brother died in the Holocaust. The family moved to France for 10 years, then to Los Angeles in the 1950s, where Nadelman took a job at Bullock’s Wilshire and supported her parents.

Nadelman now lives in Beverly Hills with her husband and two children. Last weekend, she sat inside the temple, pointed to a stone that had recently been installed in the wall and said: “See that stone there? That is very important. It says, ‘We have not forgotten. Second Generation.’ My children are the second generation, and I would never want them to go through what I went through.”

The oral history of Raoul Agilon, a retired consul general from France, traced his roots back to 1492, when one of his relatives sailed aboard the Pinta with Columbus to escape the Spanish Inquisition. Exhibits that Agilon, who is in his late 70s, contributed to the project explained that about one-third of the sailors aboard the Santa Maria, Nina and Pinta were Jews or Marranos, Jews who converted to Christianity to escape the Inquisition.

In addition to the genealogy and oral histories, there were some less cerebral forms of remembering the past: Hebrew National hot dogs, knishes and Dr. Brown’s sodas. Antacids sat at the exit with a note that read: “Please help yourself.”

There also was the dramatized script of immigrants’ recorded impressions from 100 years ago, read by the likes of James Whitmore, Bettye Ackerman Jaffe, Jonathan Silverman, Audra Lindley and Joanna Gleason before an audience of about 300 Saturday night, followed by the 1917 Charlie Chaplin film, “The Immigrant.”

Although it would be pleasant to accept Chaplin’s hilarious take on the passage to America, the recollections of one immigrant read by Silverman probably give a more accurate glimpse into how it must have felt to complete, at last, the grueling passage:

“Suddenly I was handed a landing card. It was hard to believe the ordeal was over in an afternoon. My fears were unfounded, the statue in the harbor had not turned her back on me. She was a goddess. America had accepted me.”