How one newspaper column saved lives, reunited families and changed the course of Jewish history |
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The job of the journalist is to report news, not to make it. Yet during the Holocaust and its aftermath, our predecessors at the Forward rescued thousands of refugees and shaped the course of history. From the early 20th century through the late 1970s, the Forward’s Seeking Relatives column helped Jews scattered across the globe by pogroms, war and forced migration find each other. It reconnected family members torn apart by Nazis, and allowed the lost, orphaned and isolated to create new chapters for themselves.
And yet, the critical role that Seeking Relatives played in Jewish and American history has remained largely untold. Until now.
Today we are publishing a special project by Andrew Silverstein, the intrepid and insightful reporter who last year broke the story of Rep. George Santos having lied about his Holocaust history and was named Best Freelancer by the American Jewish Press Association. Last summer, Andrew stumbled upon thousands of letters that fueled the Seeking Relatives column in the archives of Yad Vashem, and he has spent the year since doggedly and sensitively piecing together the stories that surround them. |
“No historian has ever touched this,” Hasia Diner, the eminent professor emerita of American Jewish History at NYU, told Andrew. “It’s a powerful statement about the rebuilding of Jewish communal life for Jewish families in the aftermath of the war.”
Seeking Relatives was overseen for years by Isaac Metzker, a Yiddish writer who himself emigrated from what is now Ukraine in 1924, and who joined the Forward staff after he was discharged from the U.S. Army in 1944. Metzker is far better known as the longtime curator of our beloved advice column A Bintel Brief; his files, donated decades ago to Yad Vashem, contained the priceless original letters from thousands of desperate Jews.
Aided by the Forward’s indefatigable archivist Chana Pollack, Andrew set about the fascinating and painstaking work of tracking down the people who wrote to Seeking Relatives and their descendants. On this most unusual journalistic journey, the two of them relived the experiences of Jews confined to a ghetto in Japanese-occupied Shanghai and German Jews denied entry into Palestine who ended up in the Mauritius Islands. They read pleas for help from Uzbekistan, Morocco, Jamaica. And they met the children and grandchildren of people the column helped save, most of whom had never before seen or even known about the Seeking Relatives letters.
Andrew also unearthed a previously unknown story about his own family — and that of Jared Kushner, whose great-grandfather Naum Kushner placed an ad in Seeking Relatives in 1946.
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In this High Holiday season of reflection and remembrance, when many of us will be gathering with family, we at the Forward are proud to be excavating this forgotten chapter of Jewish history, the history of Jewish families. In this special report, you’ll learn the story of how Seeking Relatives came to be and why it mattered, and meet eight of the individuals whose trajectories the column forever changed — eight among thousands.
Shana Tova,
Adam Langer
Executive Editor
P.S. We aim to create a searchable digital database of Seeking Relatives columns and the letters behind them. If you’d like to support that effort, click here to make a tax-deductible donation |
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