New York (CNN) -- As snow fell across New York Harbor, Isabel Belarsky clutched her mother, Clara, aboard a passenger ship that puttered toward Ellis Island and wondered what their new lives would bring. The year was 1930. About a week earlier, the 10-year-old girl from what is now called St. Petersburg, Russia, had embarked on a transatlantic journey with her Ukrainian parents from the French port city of Cherbourg, escaping what she described as Jewish persecution at the start of Joseph Stalin's Soviet Union. On an island near Manhattan stood the copper colossus that would etch her first memories of the new world.
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Friday marks the 125th anniversary of the unveiling of the Statue of Liberty
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A Russian immigrant recalls her Ellis Island passage in 1930
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The Statue of Liberty was a French gift
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Webcams stream video footage from the torch on anniversary
The young family would nonetheless settle more permanently in a west @placeholder apartment.