Shrine For Immigrants Millions Of Americans Can Trace Their Roots Through Ellis Island. Now, You Can Pay $100 And Give Your Ancestors A Place In History.

If the Statue of Liberty is an international symbol of America's freedom, then Ellis Island was freedom's gateway. That gate swung open to 17 million immigrants from 1892 to 1954, the largest human migration in modern history.

Today, more than 40 percent of all Americans - about 100 million people - can trace their roots to an ancestor who passed through the federal immigration facility that came to be known simply as Ellis Island.

Among those immigrants who passed through Ellis Island were Italians Arthur Forlenza and Nancy D'Ambrisi, the in-laws of Mary Forlenza of Cherry Hill, and Josephine Schybrucht Kolanko, the Polish grandmother of Maureen Pugh of the city's Somerton section.

Those names of immigrants past are mentioned here because they, and about 50,000 other immigrants to the United States, are going to be immortalized in an American Immigrant Wall of Honor, just part of what the public will see in October 1989, when the refurbished immigration facility will open after more than four years of work and $140 million in renovations.

Raising that much money for work on Ellis Island has not been difficult.

"Ellis has not been a hard sell. It's so emotional for so many people," said Stephen Briganti, president of the Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Foundation. "When Ellis Island was no longer needed (in 1954), we just let it go and forgot that it was so important to so many people." The island, just a few hundred yards north of the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor, will feature an immigration museum, a library for immigration studies, an oral-history studio, theaters and numerous artifacts related to the Ellis Island experience.

It also will feature the Wall of Honor.

"It was Lee Iacocca's idea," said Briganti, referring to the Chrysler chairman who also is chairman emeritus of the Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Foundation. "Lee said we needed to raise more money, but we had to give something back."

So, since early this year, the foundation has been asking Americans to donate a minimum of $100 to get the name of an immigrant relative or friend on the Wall of Honor, which will be inside the Great Hall on Ellis Island. The names will also be listed in a computer registry.