TRAVEL INSIDER : Jewish Heritage Tours Expanding Worldwide : Trends: Opening of Eastern Europe to tourism has spurred interest among curious Americans with roots in the region. South America is also attracting visitors.

As a veteran foreign correspondent and a pursuer of her Jewish roots, Ruth Ellen Gruber has been investigating Eastern Europe since the early 1970s. But it was only two years ago, on a tour of old synagogues and cemeteries in Poland, that she found a project to unite her cultural and professional backgrounds.

“We saw centuries-old buildings and cemeteries that don’t appear in any travel literature,” Gruber recalls. “I became utterly fascinated with what was there, and at the same time angered and outraged that these places were forgotten, were unknown . . . I wanted to put these places on the map.”

The 305-page book that resulted, “Jewish Heritage Travel--A Guide to Central and Eastern Europe” (John Wiley & Sons; paperback, $14.95), was published in February. Designed to emphasize accessible landmarks and thick with lore from centuries past, it covers Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Yugoslavia and Bulgaria.

For Gruber, whose grandparents emigrated to the United States from Eastern Europe, the effort came to feel like a personal campaign. But her book is also part of a broader trend. Publishers, travel agents and tourism officials in Europe and the United States seem to be paying more attention than ever before to travelers interested in Jewish history.

Varig Brazilian Airlines last year published a new “Jewish Traveler’s Guide to South America.” While it may surprise some people who think first of German immigration to South America, thousands of European Jews also found their way to the continent after World War II.

Grand Prix Journeys, which operates tours in cooperation with Varig, has just completed a 26-minute promotional video offering “a view of Jewish life in Latin America,” and Grand Prix President Arthur Berman reports that the company is now looking into Jewish heritage tours to South Africa and Australia. (Gran Prix Journeys, 425 Madison Ave., New York 10017, 800-242-7749.)

While Spain celebrates Columbus’ journey to America in 1492, Turkey is celebrating its admission of Jews who were cast out by the Spanish government the same year. The Quincentennial Foundation of Istanbul (777 3rd Ave., New York 10017, 212-546-1548) and the Turkish Tourism Information Office (821 United Nations Plaza, New York 10017, 212-687-2194) are promoting a program featuring various lectures and special events, including an Istanbul performance by the Israeli Philharmonic Orchestra in August.

Then there are authors Stephen and Monica Ostrow, who in August published an expanded edition of their book, “The Complete Guide to Kosher Dining & Travel.” The new edition lists more than 1,200 restaurants worldwide that meet Kosher dietary standards. For $49.95, customers get the guide, are enrolled in the Kosher Club, receive a bimonthly newsletter and qualify for various discounts. (The Kosher Club, 82-84 Genung St., Middletown, N.Y. 10940, 800-356-7437.)

Travel to Israel, meanwhile, has fallen off substantially. Israeli tourism officials, who blame the Gulf War for recent declines, counted 303,838 American visitors to Israel in 1989, 287,110 in 1990 and 265,261 in 1991.

One obvious factor in the rise of Jewish heritage travel is the opening of Eastern Europe, where nearly 5 million Jews once resided, to American tourism.

“My curiosity is getting to me,” says Meyer Hersch, 70, a semi-retired Beverly Hills builder who this June is taking three grandchildren on a trip to Poland and Israel. One inspiration for the journey, Hersch said, came when he asked his 16-year-old granddaughter what she knew about Auschwitz.

“My granddaughter wasn’t sure,” he recalls, “but she thought she recognized the name.” Hersch has scheduled a pre-trip visit to a psychiatrist to prepare the grandchildren for what they will see.

Another factor in heritage travel’s new popularity could be a recent surge of interest in genealogy among American Jews.

“It’s just growing by leaps and bounds. And more groups all over the country are forming,” says Laura Klein, past president of the Jewish Genealogical Society, Los Angeles. Klein estimates that the group’s membership in Los Angeles has grown from about 300 to near 400 in the last year. Their travel opportunities, she says, seem to be growing just as fast.

“RETRACE your family roots and heritage,” promises a recent brochure from Soviet Home & Host, a Minneapolis-based company that places American Jews in formerly Soviet households. “CELEBRATE Passover with a Jewish family from Minsk.” (Soviet Home & Host International, 2445 Park Ave. S., Minneapolis, Minn. 55404, 800-768-4388.)

This new boom, Ruth Gruber suggests, poses a chance for travelers to reach beyond the “martyrology tours” that concentrate on World War II atrocity sites.

The Holocaust must be remembered, she reasons, “but we can’t think of Eastern European Jewry simply in terms of its destruction.” She proposes her book’s synagogues and even its pre-1939 cemeteries as places that can turn a traveler’s attention to Jewish life, not death.

In gathering information for the book, Gruber writes in an early chapter, “I became mesmerized and at times a little obsessed. I wanted to visit, touch, see, feel as many places as I could. I almost felt it as a duty. As I entered broken gates or climbed over broken walls into cemeteries where a Jew may not have set foot in years, I wanted to spread my arms and embrace them all, embrace all the gravestones, all the people buried there; all the memories.”

Still, Eastern Europe is but one Jewish culture-seeker’s possibility among many. One 1992 summertime tour of “The Orient Through Jewish Eyes,” organized by Lotus Tours Ltd. of New York and Rabbi Marvin Tokayer, is scheduled to visit a Jewish cemetery in Yokohama, a Japanese Zionist group known as Makuya and a centuries-old well in Kyoto, which is inscribed in ancient text as the “well of Israel.” (Lotus Tours Ltd., 2 Mott St., New York 10013, 212-267-5414.)

All of this, however, should not obscure the less costly heritage exploration possibilities closer to home.

John Wiley & Sons, publishers of Gruber’s guide to Central and Eastern Europe, this year have also published “Jewish Museums of North America” (paperback, $12.95), a 242-page guidebook by Nancy Frazier. Among its entries for California:

--The Judah L. Magnes Museum (2911 Russell St., Berkeley 94705, 510-549-6950), which traces the life of an 1893 Oakland High School graduate who went on to become the first rabbi ordained west of the Mississippi and co-founded the American Civil Liberties Union.

--The Hebrew Union College Skirball Museum (3077 University Ave., Los Angeles 90007-3796, 213-749-3424), which includes 18,000 objects and is described as one of the most important Judaica collections in the world. (College officials expect to open a new cultural center in the Sepulveda Pass in 1993.)

--The Platt Art Gallery and Smalley Family Sculpture Garden at the University of Judaism, (15600 Mulholland Drive, Los Angeles 90077, 310-476-9777), which includes modern works from such artists as Jenny Holzer and Keith Haring.

--The Levi Strauss & Co. Museum (250 Valencia St., San Francisco 94103, 415-565-9159), which documents the career of the German-born jeans-maker. (Tours are free, but available on Wednesdays only, by reservation.)