Forward: How I stumbled upon thousands of Holocaust-era letters and traced the stories behind them

Forward: How I stumbled upon thousands of Holocaust-era letters and traced the stories behind them. “The letter was dated July 17, 1939, and signed by a man named Joseph Gross. He was writing from New York to thank the Forward for helping to find his relatives. Alongside it in the digital archive was a letter written in Yiddish, dated the following week, sent from Brussels and signed by Avrom Gross, Joseph’s cousin. ‘I read the letter with such great astonishment,” Avrom wrote. “I have no way of thanking you.’ I stumbled across these letters online, in the digitized archives of the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial and Museum in Jerusalem, while searching for references to a column called Seeking Relatives that ran for decades in the Forward.”