Someone Kept The Letters
Once upon a time, people wrote letters.
They wrote because someone they loved was far away. They wrote to share news, make plans, complain about the weather, tell a joke, offer reassurance, or simply fill the distance between one person and another.
They teased.
They worried.
They flirted.
They wrote I love you.
They wrote I miss you.
They wrote write soon.
And then someone kept the letters. Perhaps that is the most remarkable part of the story.
A letter that took only a few minutes to write might spend decades tucked inside a drawer, a box or an envelope bundled together with others. It might survive a move across town, across the country or across an ocean. Someone kept it because the person who wrote it mattered. Years later, someone else decided to keep it too.
Nobody had to.
And yet, somehow, these fragile pieces of paper survived.
Today, letters preserved by the Jewish Museum & Archives of BC allow us to enter moments that otherwise would have disappeared completely. Our online exhibitions Letters Home, Letters of Love and Laughter and A Transcontinental Love offer glimpses into relationships unfolding in real time — through courtship and marriage, separation and reunion, family news, humour, longing and all the wonderfully ordinary details of everyday life.
The people who wrote these letters had no idea we would ever read their words.
They weren’t trying to create history.
They were simply writing to someone who mattered to them.
And perhaps that is exactly why their letters matter so much.
History isn’t made only in public documents, newspaper headlines or accounts of great events. Sometimes history is simply someone sitting down with a pen and paper because there is a person, somewhere else, they desperately want to talk to.
But there is another part of the story.
Someone recognized that these letters were worth saving.
At some point, a family chose not to throw them away. And eventually, someone entrusted them to an archive, allowing a private family story to become part of our shared community memory.
Thank goodness they did.
Because every generation makes decisions — usually without realizing it — about what the next generation will be able to remember.
Today, many of our most intimate conversations live in emails, text messages and phones rather than envelopes tucked away in drawers. Perhaps that makes the question even more important:
What are we keeping?
What photographs, letters, documents and stories are sitting in our own homes right now? Which ones might help someone fifty or a hundred years from now understand who we were, whom we loved, what made us laugh, what we worried about and how we lived?
At the Jewish Museum & Archives of BC, preservation often begins long before something reaches our archives.
It begins with someone saying:
Don’t throw that away.
Our 2026 Annual Campaign, Preserving Our Stories. Connecting Our Future., helps ensure that when these pieces of our history are entrusted to us, we can preserve them, care for them and make their stories accessible to generations still to come.
Because sometimes an archive begins with something as simple as a letter.
And someone who loved it enough to keep it.
Explore these online exhibits and the remarkable letters and the stories they preserve:
Letters of Love and Laughter
Help us preserve the stories of Jewish life in British Columbia by contributing to our 2026 Annual Campaign !
