Moms of the Century : Celebration: Four generations represented at Mother’s Day party at the Jewish Home for the Aging.

She didn’t know the song--it sounded more Latin than Jewish--and she certainly didn’t know the proper steps, but Rose Sattler, 89, gripped her hip-walker and danced a ferocious hora-Charleston combination.

It was a Mother’s Day dance for a special friend.

“She’s going to be 102 years old in June,” Sattler said of her absent cohort. “She’s having trouble breathing and couldn’t be here.”

So this dance was for her.

Sattler’s friend couldn’t make it, but 450 other Yiddishe mamas did, together with more than 1,100 of their offspring. The Jewish Home for the Aging in Reseda billed Sunday’s event as The Largest Mother’s Day Celebration in the World.

Of course, The Largest Mother’s Day Celebration in the World--verification pending with the Guinness Book of World Records--would not have been complete without The Largest Mother’s Day Card in the World--a 10-foot-tall, 16-foot-wide vision decorated with dozens of heart-shaped stickers bearing handwritten wishes.

Hosted by Academy Award-winning actor Martin Landau, the event was part-kitsch, part-traditional Jewish merrymaking and part-poignant kvell to honor mothers who, on average, can look back on 90 Mother’s Days.

“I’m 100,” said Sadye Hirschson. “Well, a little older.”

Hirschson--like many of the mothers who wrapped themselves in knitted shawls and sat in the sun--was surrounded by progeny born a century after her parents emigrated from Poland and decades after she took an ocean liner from New York through the Panama Canal to settle in Los Angeles.

She pointed out a daughter, her daughter’s son and her daughter’s son’s sons. “Four generations,” she said with a bright smile.

“Four generations,” her family echoed.

Meanwhile, a Marilyn Monroe look-alike sauntered through the crowd, batting her eyelashes and cooing sexily. A Barbra Streisand impersonator posed for photographs with a big-haired Elizabeth Taylor. Bugs Bunny was there, as was the balloon-twisting Karlos the Klown.

In announcing his next number, one singer fairly summed up the day’s eclectic atmosphere of gratitude and festivity. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he proclaimed, drawing out his words. “I just can’t help falling in love with you--you’re so beeeautiful!”

While the Reseda gathering represented a healthy percentage of the San Fernando Valley’s Jewish mothers, it was only a fraction of all those honored Sunday. According to the U.S. Department of Commerce, 73.9 million women in the United States have an average of 2.7 people calling them “Mom.”

Those at the Jewish Home for the Aging, however, have done considerably more mothering than the typical American mother. While the average age there is 90, there were more mothers on hand Sunday who had lived 100 years than had lived 80 years, said Murray Wood, the home’s vice president for fund development.

But even as hundreds of mothers gushed about their “son the doctor” or their “daughter the world traveler,” others sat quiet and alone. Eva, who declined to give her last name and would say only that she was “over 90--you never say how much over,” fiddled with an orange balloon creature offered by Karlos the Klown as the band kicked off “My Yiddishe Mama.”

Her sister’s children had come by for a visit, but Eva had never had any of her own. Her husband died many years ago. Sunday, like other days, Eva spent mostly by herself. “It’s no fun getting old,” she said. “I had a very noisy past, but a very quiet future.”

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