They packed their hopes and dreams, and through the gate they came with treasures from home: house keys, exquisite linens, red glass pitchers etched with Stars of David.

On a bleak, cold day in December 2003 a crowded ferry makes its way across New York Harbor. Passengers pack the decks, straining for their first chance to photograph the Statue of Liberty up close. A line from “Angels in America,” something the rabbi said in his eulogy for Louis’s grandmother, comes to mind: “You can never make that crossing that she made, for such great voyages no longer exist.” No, this is not your grandmother’s journey. This is the Circle Line ferry heading for the museum of that journey, of millions of those journeys, on Ellis Island. But the distance between this sightseeing trip and those life-altering ones is not as vast as you might think.

Forty percent of Americans are descended from people who passed through the immigration center that occupied this tiny spot of land, part New York’s, part New Jersey’s, from 1892 until 1954. On that recent winter afternoon, for instance, there was the Irish woman from Baltimore, giving her 10-year-old son a quick family history refresher course. Conversations in Spanish, Yiddish, Italian, German, Chinese, Russian mingled with the cries of babies and seagulls.

This may not be one of the “great voyages” but it is gripping. You’re not just traveling across space, but back in time.

In the early part of last century Ellis Island attracted many newspaper reporters who tended to write sentences like: “The day of the emigrant’s arrival in New York was the nearest earthly likeness to the final Day of Judgment, when we have to prove our fitness to enter Heaven.” Anyone arriving here today could be forgiven for similarly overwrought sentiments. This is an overwhelming experience. But don’t allow yourself to overlook the darker side of the story of Ellis Island. According to a young Italian-American interpreter named Fiorello LaGuardia, “I never managed during the years I worked there to become callous to the mental anguish, the disappointment and the despair I witnessed almost daily…. At best the work was an ordeal.”

Today’s Ellis Island presents and preserves both the reality and the romance of the “great voyage.” Consider this for starters: Of the 12 million people who arrived here between 1892 and 1954, only two percent were sent back.

History
Samuel Ellis was a New York merchant who at some point during the American Revolution became owner of a muddy little island in New York’s bay. But the history of this unimposing bit of land began way before that. Native Americans named it Gull Island after the seabirds that flocked there. The governors of Nieuw Amsterdam bought it in 1630, renamed it Little Oyster Island and proceeded to harvest shellfish. When pirates were executed there it became Gibbet Island. In 1808, when it was still owned by the Ellises the defense-conscious federal government bought it for $10,000 and it became a fort. But the Ellis name remained.

After the War of 1812, the island was used for munitions storage until 1890, when the House Committee on Immigration decided that it offered the perfect alternative for the problem-fraught Castle Garden immigration station where prospective new citizens slept on the floor, went hungry and were routinely cheated by money-changers and other con artists.

Two years, $500,000 and a lot of landfill later, a splendid Georgia pine arrivals building topped by a quartet of turrets opened its doors. The first immigrant to step inside was 15-year-old Annie Moore from County Cork, Ireland. She was followed by about 700 more newcomers that day alone—450,000 the first year. Then the numbers decreased until 1900 because of tightening immigration laws, a cholera scare and the economic depression that began in 1893.

In December 1900, a palatial new arrivals building, of fireproof red brick and sculpted limestone, adorned with elegant ironwork and festive towers, was inaugurated. To the steerage passengers (first- and second-class passengers proceeded immediately to the mainland) emerging from weeks trapped in mobbed, dank, filthy, noisy, stinking, disease-ridden quarters, it was truly a vision of hope and promise. Unfortunately, the ethics of some of the people employed here were not as fine as their surroundings. Currency exchange rates and prices of railroad tickets and food were inflated; bribes were demanded; rudeness and cruelty were rampant. But in 1902, a new commissioner of immigration instituted drastic reforms, heralded by signs everywhere demanding “kindness and consideration.”

Still, the average immigrant, exhausted and unable to speak or understand English, quaked at the prospect of getting the door to the New World to open, the “hundred forms and ceremonies, grindings and grumblings of the key,” as Henry James decorously put it. Even the kindest and most considerate person in uniform could appear terrifying. “We were scared of uniforms,” a Russian Jewish woman recalled.“It took us back to the Russian uniforms that we were running away from.” And there were so many questions—about “character, anarchism, polygamy, insanity, crime, money, relatives, work,” as Washington Irving wrote. What seemed like the right answer could be the wrong one. For instance, saying “yes” to “Do you have a job waiting?” could get you detained or deported since contracting for foreign labor was illegal. On top of everything else, unsophisticated refugees were easy marks for swindlers and even white slavers lurking at the docks.

East European Jews faced a special problem. After a journey that may have outlasted their kosher food supplies, they discovered that Ellis Island had none to offer them. Kosher food wasn’t provided until 1911. But the founding of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS) in 1902 by a group of Russian Jews, recent arrivals themselves, improved conditions considerably. At Ellis Island and at other ports of entry, HIAS representatives served as mediators and interpreters for the immigrants, found them housing and fed them until relatives or friends showed up, searched for relatives and friends who didn’t show up, and put in all-nighters scouring the late editions of newspapers for jobs. During Ellis Island’s peak years, 1904 to 1909, 1907 was the biggest year of all—the HIAS mediator was Alexander Harkavy, better known as the compiler of a famous Yiddish-English dictionary.

World War I brought the influx of newcomers almost to a halt. But the decline in the island’s population turned out to be a blessing. When saboteurs blew up munitions-loaded cargo at Black Tom Wharf on the New Jersey shore, none of the 500 immigrants and 125 employees was seriously hurt, although the blasts were heard all the way to Philadelphia.

Immigration picked up after the war, but restrictive laws of 1917, 1921, 1924 and 1929 slowed it to a trickle. During World War II, the island doubled as a detention center for enemy aliens and spies. At the end of 1954, when only 21,000 people came through, the immigration center was closed. The island became a Coast Guard station. In 1965, it was taken over by the National Park Service and made part of the Statue of Liberty National Monument. In 1982, Lee Iacocca was asked by President Ronald Reagan to head a fund-raising campaign to restore Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty. The Main Building, brilliantly transformed into the Ellis Island Immigration Museum at the high cost of $170 million (the largest restoration of its kind in American history) welcomed its first visitors on September 10, 1990. Preservation of the other buildings on the island continues.

Sights
On entering the wide open spaces where immigrants lined up for train tickets and stored their baggage, you’ll immediately be drawn to a huge and poignant display. Pieces of luggage, donated by immigrants and their families, are stacked under black-and-white blowups of newly arrived refugees and their belongings. At the information booth on the left you can rent an audio tour (paper scripts are available for the hearing impaired) and find out when the movie Ellis Island: Island of Hope, Island of Tears will be shown. It begins in the Old World’s shtetls and seaports and brings “the great voyage” to life in gritty black-and-white footage narrated partly by immigrants themselves.

A good way to begin taking in the building is to walk around it. Go out the back doors to the American Immigrant Wall of Honor, which snakes in silvery sections almost to the seawall. Among the more than 600,000 names inscribed on it are relatives of George Washington, John F. Kennedy, Lee Iacocca and Barbra Streisand; members of your family could join them (www.wallofhonor. com). On the skyline side of the building, you’ll encounter a series of small but wonderful sculptures by Philip Ratner called The New Immigrants. But most mesmerizing is the building itself, the enormity of its meaning, its mystery and mystique.

Back inside, ignore the new elevators and experience one of the four old slate stairways that the immigrants used. Millions of pairs of feet trudged up and down them and the wood banisters seem burnished by the touch of millions of hands. Permanently stalled in the stairwell closest to the first floor restrooms and café is a silver-painted iron cage elevator. It is said never to have worked efficiently even when it was new because graft warped its construction.

Go all the way to the third floor to begin your tour with “Treasures from Home,” an exhibition that demonstrates how eloquently each person’s objects can speak to and for them. “Most dear to me,” goes a blown-up quote from Birgitta Hedman Fichter, who came from Sweden in 1924, “are the shoes my mother wore when she first set foot on the soil of America. You must see them to appreciate the courage my parents had and the sacrifices they made. My mother’s shoes tell the whole story.”

For Cantor Solomon Richman (known as Zelman Reichman when he arrived from Poland in 1923) it was a sheet of music he composed. For Harris Kaminsky, who came from Russia in 1900, it was his elegant white wedding vest. For Giovanni Stranese, who came in 1901 fleeing unemployment in Biella, Italy, it was his house key that he brought in his pocket in case he wanted to return one day. In Northampton, Massachusetts, he found work in a textile mill for $5 a week and soon brought over his sweetheart, Rosina Comoglio. They were married on Ellis Island and raised two daughters in America. On display are exquisite linen items from Rosina Stranese’s trousseau—and the house key.

The Mirelowitz family display is easy to miss because it’s behind a showcase of objects evoking “Spiritual Life” (from tefilin to rosaries). Be sure to look for it. The portraits of 6-foot 9-inch Barnett Mirelowitz in the uniform of the czar’s army and his wife, Jenny, are stunning. So are their red glass pitchers with clear cut-glass bases incised with Stars of David, their mandolin and the glass tumblers painted with apple blossoms.

Pick up the phone next to the display and hear their grandson, Stan Mirel, reminisce about their escape from pogroms and political persecution, about the farm and bungalow colony they managed to buy in upstate New York after years on the Lower East Side, about his grandfather speaking only Yiddish to his cows and horses. They were poor, Mirel observes, but so much better off than they had been in the old country.

Also on the third floor is a typical dormitory room circa 1908. The three-tiered cots are canvas lashed to iron frames. Only in 1924 did detainees get actual mattresses. Be sure to walk around the balcony overlooking the vast second floor Registry Room before descending one flight via the escalator next to “Treasures from Home” to thoroughly appreciate the most dramatic architectural statement: a red-brick exterior wall made into an interior one illuminated by skylights that also expose several of the gorgeous towers on the roof. At the bottom of the escalator turn the corner to the right for a lovely surprise—Ralph Fasanella’s painting Family Supper (1972), an elaborate yet simple visualization of all the warmth and all the pain of the artist’s immigrant childhood.

Straight ahead is the Registry Room as it looked from 1918 to 1924, vast, empty save for a few long benches, with a shiny, terracotta tiled floor and way up beyond the balcony where you just stood, an arching, vaulted tiled ceiling. A historical marker explains that between 1900 and 1924 this huge space was filled to overflowing almost every day with immigrants. Oddly, its present emptiness prods the imagination more than a thousand displays would. And even beyond the Registry Room, wandering through a succession of smaller rooms that take you “Through America’s Gate” from preliminary medical exams to freedom to board the ferry to the mainland, it is the chipped white honeycomb floor tiles, the walls painted dull yellow, all the authentic old bones and sinews of this place, that move the heart more than any number of stunning photographs or stirring words—until, at last, you arrive at the “Benevolent Offerings” room. Here you’ll see a Hebrew-language Book of Psalms that HIAS workers presented to immigrants, a citizenship book in Russian from the Daughters of the American Revolution, photos of a Christmas celebration on the island and a 1920 Seder for Jewish immigrants and staff.

But the pièce de résistance is a january 16, 1926, article by the National Education Alliance service writer Virginia Swain that begins: “New clothes for old, new faces for old, new wives for old—these are the wares turned out by the beauty mill at Ellis Island. One petticoat for six, bobbed hair for long, kid slippers for peasant brogues—every possible weapon is given the incoming peasant wife, for her fight against the formidable competition of the American flapper.”

The article goes on to describe the work of Mrs. Ludmila K. Foxlee and her YWCA minions—makeovers! Alarmed by the condition of women coming to join husbands who had been here for years, Foxlee and her crew combated coarse hands, thinning hair, Old World costumes and trepidation with cutting-edge makeup, fashionable clothing, stylish haircuts and pep talks. The nervousness of these women, they realized, was not misplaced. Years of separation and their husbands’ exposure to new and seductive ways, not to mention other women, could be disastrous. Lipstick and powder might save a marriage!

A lot of visitors, you’ll notice, take breathers as they journey through the museum, sitting at length on the benches, gazing up at skylights and ceilings, looking out the many windows at the water, the trees, the other buildings that someday will be renovated, at the sky, the skyline, the Verrazano Narrows Bridge, the Statue of Liberty. These moments of reflection, these images, your own memories, are all part of this museum of so many journeys. And they are infinitely moving. So is the sight of the grand main building receding into the background as you glide on the return ferry toward Battery Park just as your grandparents and great-grandparents did years and years ago, having transcended the “hundred forms and ceremonies,” having gotten in—a silent coda.

Recommendations
The ticket booth for Circle Line trips to the Statue of Liberty
and Ellis Island is inside Castle Clinton
(212-269-5755; www.circlelineferry.com).

The original Castle Clinton fort was built during the War of 1812 and named for DeWitt Clinton, who served as both mayor of New York City and governor of the state. It underwent many changes, until finally becoming part of the Lower Manhattan family of national monuments.

The trip to Ellis Island takes 40 minutes and is via Liberty Island, where you can walk around the Statue of Liberty, admire views of Manhattan and Ellis Island and visit the gift shop, but not go inside the statue. It has remained closed since 9/11. Still, it’s a thrill actually to stand right next to this most American and democratic of icons, a gift from France to America on our one hundredth birthday, designed by Frederic August Bartholdi, engineered by Gustav Eiffel (of tower fame) and shipped here in 214 crates. The pedestal, with its astounding star-shaped base, was designed by Richard Morris Hunt.

But it was the young Jewish poet Emma Lazarus (see sidebar, page 42) who articulated the statue’s meaning for posterity. In Battery Park next to Castle Clinton, there is a memorial to Lazarus, a simple plaque inscribed with “The New Colossus.”

Nearby is the Jerusalem Grove, over a dozen cedar trees given to New York by the city of Jerusalem in the historic year of 1976. The beauty and meaning of the Grove is now enhanced by the Battery Labyrinth for Contemplation, a recycled stone “walking meditation” planted with healing plants such as artemisia and lavender, a place to escape the hubbub of nearby West Street for a few moments of reflection. It is in full view of where the World Trade Center once stood.

A short walk from Battery Park, at 36 Battery Place, is the Museum of Jewish Heritage (646-437-4200; www. mjhnyc.org), an informative multimedia exploration of Jewish family life and traditions, the Holocaust and the struggle of Jewish renewal that began in 1945 and continues today. This was the Jewish institution closest to ground zero; it was also the first institution to announce major construction plans in the aftermath of the attacks, another important signal to the world that New York was on the road to recovery.

Side Trip
The Lower East Side is a trip in itself (several, in fact). But its proximity to Lower Manhattan justifies even a quick visit, especially if you’re hungry. Find out about dining options, as well as anything else you want to know about the original old neighborhood, at the Lower East Side District Management Association, 261 Broome Street (866-224-0206; www. lowereastsideny.com). Around the corner, just off Broome on Orchard Street is the legendary Guss’s Pickles. Between the barrels of anything pickled and the poster of Amy Irving in the window, you can’t miss it. Cattycorner from Guss’s at 90 Orchard is the Lower East Side Tenement Museum (212-431-0233; www. tenement. org) where you can take tours of flats just like grandma used to live in, and take home volumes on the immigrant experience.

Reading
Start with Irving Howe’s classic World of Our Fathers (Schocken). Then try some of the compelling memoirs and fictional accounts of coming to America including anything by Anzia Yezierska and Mary Antin; Abraham Cahan’s The Rise of David Levinsky (Modern Library). Also The Bintl Brief and The Travels of David Toback (both Schocken) and Michael Gold’s Jews Without Money (Carroll & Graf). But above all, Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep (Noonday).