During my father’s 1957 summer trip to Israel, he wrote thirty-eight letters to his parents and younger brother Alan. His family lived in Brooklyn but were lodging in their bungalow in the Catskill Mountains most of that summer. My father hardly missed a day writing to them, sending the letters to both addresses, most of them to his folks’ address in upstate New York. The letters were apparently stored away by my grandparents in a box in the basement of their Brooklyn home. They remained buried there for decades, with nobody knowing of their existence. Not even my father knew that his parents had saved his letters.

When my grandfather William Jacobs passed away in 1973 and my grandmother Fannie Jacobs passed away in 1981, the house was cleared out and boxes were moved to our attic on Westwood Ave in Staten Island. This is where they remained until 1999 until my parents moved to 480 Cumberland St. in Englewood N.J., taking everything from the attic with them, including the boxes containing the letters.
 
As the years passed, more and more boxes accumulated. These boxes contained the unsorted belongings of three generations – my father and mother’s parents and their extended families. Adding to the dusty storage were my belongings and those of my wife Debra which we left behind in the States when we moved to Israel in 2004. Besides old possessions from my siblings, there were over 200 boxes of business files and accumulated piles of miscellaneous junk and old furniture.

In 2015, while I was visiting the U.S., my parents told us that they were moving to Florida and needed to clear out the house because they were selling it. I volunteered for the task, and during that year, whenever I was in the States, I would go through the mass amount of storage in the basement and garage. Access was difficult, because besides the boxes, there was a lot of old forsaken furniture. “If it hasn’t been used for all these years, that means it’s probably not important, so just throw it out”, was the well-meaning advice I was hearing. This certainly would have been the easiest thing to do. But I couldn’t do that. Instead, I sorted through thousands of boxes of personal items, categorizing what should be thrown out and what should stay.

It was like an archaeological dig, sifting through boxes of past generations. I eventually reached boxes of pictures and paraphernalia from the 1920’s, including love letters between my grandmother and grandfather. I then came upon an unexpected treasure: I found the thirty-eight letters my father wrote, buried in several different boxes, along with photographs of his 1957 trip scattered around! Everything was in mint condition. 

As I began reading them, I knew I had stumbled upon something special. I sorted them by date and placed them in a red folder, separating each letter in a plastic protector. I scanned them and typed each one to make it easier for people to read. In one of the letters, my father mentioned that he was keeping a diary. I turned the attic upside down once again trying to find it, but I never did. 

The final part of the miracle was this: One week after I discovered the letters, the basement at the New Jersey home was flooded with sewage backup. Whatever remained there was ruined and thrown out. Had I not recovered the box of letters and photos when I did, they would have been lost forever!