A Trinket or a Treasure?

They trekked to Mount Sinai Memorial Park bearing family heirlooms and oddities from musty attics, with a question on their lips: Is it a tchotchke or a treasure?

They came away from the Simi Valley cemetery’s first Judaica Road Show and Art Exhibit on Sunday with a few surprising appraisals and plenty of anecdotes.

Dolores and Marcia Abrams of North Hollywood, two of the more than 200 people who showed up to the event styled after PBS’ “Antiques Road Show,” took off their jewelry and showed it to appraiser Zia Ghahary. To Marcia’s surprise, the tiny gold pendants were worth $1,200.

“Really?” said Marcia, 67. “You’re kidding! God, I just throw them around.”

“You should take care of them,” cautioned Ghahary. “They’re going to be valuable someday.”

Dolores’ peony-shaped pendant centered with a Star of David was appraised at $800. As for the Moses pendant she recently added to the necklace, for $20 at Farmers Market, “That one’s a tchotchke,” Dolores said.

One couple had a small ark and torah that appraiser Joy Schonberg valued at $10,000.

“People are bringing in good things,” said Schonberg, a New York gallery owner who appraised for Christie’s auction house. “They’re not bringing in tchotchkes.”

Treasure or tchotchke, items that survived the tragic and turbulent Jewish history provoked mystery and reverence in their owners.

Ruthann Rossman of Chatsworth found out the book-shaped pendant hiding a miniaturized torah, an heirloom from her Lithuanian grandfather, was worth $500.

But the battered Czech alarm clock with Hebrew lettering provoked only polite amusement from appraiser Marcia Josephy.

“It’s not beautiful in a conventional way,” Josephy said. “If it could talk, it would tell us a lot about the people who lived in that area at that time.”

At a separate table, Schonberg and fellow appraiser Beth Weingast debated a hand-hammered silver ceremonial basin engraved, “For the remembrance of the soul of Esther, daughter of Rachel,” with two grammatical errors in the faint Hebrew lettering.

Clearly several centuries old, the piece could be Middle European in origin or a South American copy, they said. Either way, it was a priceless museum piece that owner Janos Hamori, an exporter, wanted to hold onto for a while longer.

Whether for nostalgia, preservation or investment, Judaica has become hot in the last several years, with thousands of collectors paying top dollar for historical items from the Jewish faith, said Weingast, of New Rochelle, N.Y.

“It’s a big area,” she said. “It’s growing all the time, and I would say the situation in Israel has brought attention to the more tangible items of Judaica. But now there are fewer sales, because people are holding onto what they have rather than selling it.”

Dr. Ed Kamenir, a dentist and attorney from Bel-Air, will hold onto the silver cup and mismatched saucer that his father gave him.

“Someone’s been polishing this,” Weingast scolded. “It has a very subtle engraving. The next time you bring it to me, I’ll see even less of it.”

She cradled the cup and peered at it with a magnifying glass, turning it slowly, as if to coax its story from the cold metal.

The maker--a non-Jew, because Jews were not allowed to work with silver--stamped his name in it in Russian letters, along with the date 1883 and the purity of the silver--84%, she noted.

The family probably didn’t want any overtly Jewish symbols on it, to keep the owner safe from pogroms, Weingast suggested.

“Anything of value found in a Jewish home was melted down,” she said. “This obviously was smuggled out.”

It’s worth maybe $1,800, she said.